What is the importance of keyword research in SEO?

I have been asked this question many a times. I guess I have written a few blogs on it as well. When I was fixing the topics for this week, I thought I have not shared any blog on SEO from last so many days and hence I thought to write a blog on it only.

Although as I mentioned in a blog post on some DIY SEO Tips recently that those days are gone when people were use to find the rankings of their website depending on a particular set of keywords. Now, a Google search result varies from system to system, depending on personalized data and previous searches, and hence the concept of checking the ranking of a particular website has gone away.

Although I wrote a blog post on the importance of keyword research in blogging a few years back, but I guess this blog post is not that relevant when you consider the scenario of post Penguin and Panda updates. Everything in the world of SEO changed because of those two updates and keyword research was also not an exception.

Despite being said all those things, I still can say you that if you are doing the search engine optimization of a particular website and if you are ignoring the keyword research, it simply means that all your SEO work is wasted. It is like you are working towards achieving no goals through your SEO.

Undoubtedly keyword research might be ignored, but cannot be as this is the building block of the SEO process.

 Importance of Keyword Research in SEO!

In my opinion keyword research is very much required to measure the effectiveness of ranking for those keywords or phrases, but yes depending on the success of SEO campaign on those results is not recommended. Now you can judge the effectiveness of your SEO campaign based on the keywords which you are optimizing for your website. See basically with the help of keyword research we simply want to target the best set of keywords and phrases for your website, which will have the right mix of high demand but low competitive keywords.

So here are some benefits of keyword research which can make it quite important as far as SEO is concerned:

 Fixing Right Set of Keywords

As I said above that ideally the keywords which you will target for a website or web pages, should be picked in a way that it should have the combination of right phrases, which are having low competition but high in demand.

This way you can get better results and ROI of your spends on SEO process.

After all the main target of every website is to get targeted traffic, and there is no point in fighting for highly competitive keywords. The keyword research becomes important in the scenario that it can identify the keywords which have less competition and having a good number of searches. When you do the research you will find that there are a few keywords which might have thousands of daily searches, on the other hand there are keywords which have hundreds of searches only. You will realize that it is really easy to get ranked on those keywords which have a few less number of daily searches and less competition as well.

This process will guide you about your chances of success in search engine optimization procedure.

 Short Tail vs. Long Tail Keywords

Keyword research is the process which can help you to decide about short tail or long tail keywords depending on your industry.

While researching for something tries to improvise the keyword depending on some specific needs of your industry and identify the number of searches and competition for those keywords.

Thus you will get a better set of keywords.

 Milestone for SEO

Although as I said that results might vary for different systems for the same keyword, thus it is not an ideal situation to judge the success of your SEO process depending on keywords ranking, but still it will give you some idea about your SEO campaign.

If you are seeing the improvement in the ranking of your target keywords, it is a good positive sign for the success of your SEO campaign.

Thus in that scenario as well it becomes quite important.

Though I wanted to share some more stuffs on this topic, but I guess those three were the main reasons which can increase the importance of the keyword research process. Hopefully you all will like it. On the other hand if you do know some more things about it, please don’t hesitate in sharing the same with us.

Your comments are highly appreciated, and I will be waiting for those.