Your time is valuable, so it’s critical to do keyword analysis for SEO. With a keyword analysis, you evaluate a keyword’s metrics, search intent, and business relevancy to see if it’s worth your time to create content for it. Learn more about how to do a keyword analysis for SEO below!
What is keyword analysis?
Keyword analysis is the process of researching a search term and evaluating its relevancy to your business and website. Elements analyzed include search volume, search intent, business relevancy, and more. Keyword analysis is critical to building an effective SEO campaign.
Why is SEO keyword analysis important?
In search engine optimization (SEO), keyword analysis is important for a few reasons, including the following:
- Time: While keyword analysis takes time, it also saves you time. Producing SEO content can take hours, and if you produce content that targets a non-relevant keyword, you’ll have wasted a significant amount of time. SEO keyword analysis saves you from this fate.
- Effectiveness: Keyword analysis helps you target more relevant keywords, which can help you build a more effective SEO strategy. For example, instead of selecting keywords that generate traffic, you choose keywords that generate qualified traffic.
- Performance: SEO programs that practice keyword analysis tend to see better SEO results. Because these programs focus on targeting the relevant keywords with optimal keyword metrics, they tend to achieve their traffic and revenue goals.
SEO keyword analysis is a critical part of keyword research with all its benefits.
How to do keyword analysis for SEO
Learn how to do keyword analysis for SEO with the following steps:
1. Check search volume
Search volume estimates the monthly searches for a given keyword. Keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere, and Semrush will share this data (though it may vary between toolkits) for your reference.
Enter your keyword in your preferred tool and view its monthly search volume.
Typically, businesses prefer if the term gets a minimum of a few hundred searches per month. If the search term appears to have a more bottom-of-the-funnel intent, consider accepting a lower monthly search volume.
Based on your search volume baseline, you can remove or keep the search term in your keyword list.
2. Evaluate keyword difficulty
Keyword difficulty estimates how difficult it is to rank for a given search term.
The stronger your backlink profile, the less you worry about this metric in SEO keyword analysis. That’s because your backlink’s strength makes ranking for these search terms less challenging. In comparison, sites with weaker backlink profiles must consider this metric more in their analysis.
If you’re curious about your site’s backlink strength, the following tools have dedicated metrics for this:
- Moz
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
Remember that these platforms have created these metrics, like Domain Rating — not Google. However, for SEOs, these metrics are useful (and reliable), so we recommend using them as a reference (but not a rule) for evaluating your backlink profile against competitive keywords.
3. Determine keyword relevancy
While keyword research tools like Semrush will categorize keywords as transactional, informational, and navigational, this step of how to analyze keywords focuses more on classifying the keyword’s relevancy to your business and its products or services.
For this step:
- Visit your preferred search engine, like Google
- Enter your search term
- View the search results
Then, analyze the search results with the following questions:
- Is the content advertised relevant to your offerings?
- Is the content’s audience similar to yours?
- Is the content advertised in alignment with your prices and price structure?
This evaluation lets you determine if the keyword is relevant and still worth targeting. The goal is to save your team time by removing keywords that don’t align with your business, target audience, and prices.
4. Analyze search intent
While the keyword’s search results open, analyze the search intent with the following questions:
- What problem are users looking to solve?
- Are the users asking this question within your target market?
- Does this search intent relate to problems your business solves?
From your analysis, you can decide whether to remove (or keep) the search term.
5. Research trendiness
Next, we recommend evaluating the keyword’s trendiness with a tool like Google Trends.
Enter the search term in Google Trends, and you can view data from the past few months (or years) to see how the keyword has risen or fallen in search volume. This step can help you spot when a search term is fading in interest, rising, or transitioning to a synonym.
For example, “Internet marketing” has decreased search volume while “digital marketing” has risen. There is still interest in the topic, but people have changed how they search for it. With Google Trends, you can spot these instances.
Once you complete this keyword analysis step, you’re ready to start producing your content!
The above walkthrough shows how our SEO team approaches keyword analysis in SEO. Everyone is different, though! While some start with analyzing keyword metrics, like search volume and competitiveness, others begin with evaluating keyword relevancy.
There is no right or wrong here, so feel free to experiment!
Get professional SEO keyword analysis with SEO.com
Congrats, you know how to analyze keywords for SEO! Now, bring that knowledge to your SEO program. If you’re looking for professional help with getting started, our award-winning SEO experts can assist. Contact us today to learn more about our SEO services!
