What you should get out of a Keyword Research Service

We tend to use the phrase “keyword research” to define all sorts of research work that implies looking at what people are typing into search engines. Keyword research needs to serve a precise purpose, and the research needs to be built around that purpose. Here are three examples of what keyword research can entail at Vine Digital:

Discovery Mode Keyword Research:

This is one of the steps we go through when we onboard a new client. It is mandatory for all websites that don’t have much historical data as well as for websites that are in very specific markets.

Thanks to this type of keyword research, we can get a feel for the size of the market, have an understanding of the audience we are going to target and set a list of keywords that we are going to track to measure performance.

The discovery mode keyword research does not take much time to be completed since we mostly rely on tools to do the job.

Content Strategy Keyword Research:

Content Strategy keyword research holds 75% of the value of any content strategy. Some SEOs might call it a Search Analysis or a Content Strategy Analysis.

Depending on the size of the content strategy we are planning to work on, as well as other factors such as the level of competition we are up against, conducting content strategy keyword research can take anywhere from a few hours to several days.

Our goal with this type of work is to identify the keywords our clients’ sites will be able to rank for by publishing targeted content.

While we have many tools we can rely on, an important part of the work is still done manually. This can take time, however, we are working on some solutions to speed up the manual part of the job. Still, to come up with the best keywords, we will always have to add a bit of a human touch to this type of keyword research.

Content Optimisation Keyword Research

Most of our content strategies come with SEO briefs that are meant to be shared with our writers (or our clients’ writers).

There is no other way than preparing an SEO brief to ensure that the content is at the standard required to rank at its full potential!

In order to build our briefs, we need to be highly granular in our keyword research. We need to know what keywords we are going to use in all of our headings, as well as what keywords we wish to mention within the paragraphs.

The content optimisation keyword research is rarely a separate deliverable. It just comes with the SEO briefs. We highly rely on tools to get this done, so it usually doesn’t take too much time.

Takeaways

• When you are being offered a keyword research service, be sure to understand what the actual purpose of that keyword research will be.
• When you order keyword research work from an SEO, be sure to ask yourself “What do I want to know?”. Otherwise, you might end up with a redundant list of keywords extracted from a random keyword research tool.