Keyword Research is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy.

It’s identifying the words and phrases people use in search engines, allowing businesses to optimize their content writing accordingly.

Understanding keyword research is vital for anyone looking to improve their website’s visibility and ranking.

This article will guide you through the process, tools, and best practices for effective keyword research.

If you want to write content for your website that will appear in Google’s search rankings, understanding how keywords work is the first step.

If you want to rank for it, you need to write about it.

There are different types of keywords, including:

Consist of broad terms, e.g., “life insurance.”

Ranking for short-tail keywords is difficult, especially in the beginning when your website is just getting started.

Short-tail keyword ranking should be a longer-term goal for your website.

Long-tail keywords are highly targeted phrases.

Examples include “life insurance for prostate cancer survivors” or “heart attack life insurance.”

The search volumes for long-tail keywords are much lower than short-tail but offer higher conversion rates and better matching to the consumer’s search intent.

In other words, long-tail keywords are easier to rank for.

Another category of keywords is LSI (latent semantic indexing), which is a fancy way to describe terms related to the main topics you write about.

Just focus on long and short-tail keywords for your purposes, and everything else will fall into place.

The role of keyword research is to help you find topics in your industry that consumers are searching for so that you can then write relevant content to meet their search objectives.

So how do you find the right keywords for your content writing?

First, you have to spend some time defining who your customer is.

Who exactly are you trying to attract to your website?

What topics are you planning to write about?

One of the best tools out there is the SEMRush keyword research tool.

You can research your competitors to see what they are ranking for, get search volumes by keyword, and help yourself plan your content calendar.

Another place to get quality keywords is Google Ads.

You don’t have to pay for ads but can use their tools to develop a list of relevant keywords.

Take a look at your competition to see what they are writing about.

Now that you have a list of keywords to target, it’s time to start writing content.

We’ll use a life insurance website for our examples.

If it’s me, I would want to have separate articles written for:

• Term Life Insurance
• Whole Life Insurance
• Universal Life Insurance

All three of the above terms will be impossible to rank for initially with a new website.

Instead, you should focus on writing articles with long-tail keywords as your focus.

For example, if you looked at SEMRush, you would see that “term life insurance” has an 81% difficulty rating percentage.

If you focus on writing articles related to term life insurance, you’ll have a better chance of ranking in the search engines.

For example, if you wrote an article about “convertible term life insurance,” you would see that the keyword difficulty percentage is 35%, making it a much easier term to rank for.

As you write additional content, you can ultimately write an article about term life insurance and link your other articles to this.

Start with long tail keywords first in your content writing.

Once you have enough content focused on long-tail words, you can start writing content focused on short-tail keywords, with the eventual plan being to link the related content together.