Keyword Research

Keywords are the words or phrases typed into a search box of search engines by people to find data that meets their needs — finding a service provider, buying products, or even finding general information across the internet — anything.

Keyword research is the process of analyzing search terms, the frequency of the search, what to rank for, creating targeted content accordingly, and consequently meeting people’s search intent via your product or service.

Keyword research is the first step to any successful SEO campaign. All of our on-page and off-page SEO techniques are built on the foundation of our keyword research. We constantly build credibility for these keywords across content creation, meta descriptions, internal linking and so many other areas of the campaign. Without identifying the right keywords, your website is missing out on big wins for your business.

Keyword research may come across as easy. You find some software, type in a word, and out comes the monthly search volume. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal more work that goes into successful keyword research.

Keyword research is more than typing keywords into software to determine their search volume. At Outpace our keyword research experts analyze industry-specific vocabulary, search intent, competition, and keyword priorities. Without taking the time to explore each of these key aspects of keyword research, it’s highly likely your team isn’t implementing the right SEO strategy. Leave it to the experts here at Outpace to get your keyword research right.

SEO is a long-term strategy to rank for keywords organically. Successful SEO isn’t something businesses turn on and off based on busy seasonality. If you want to rank at the top of the organic results, it requires constant effort both on and off of your website. At Outpace we build credibility for our clients year-round so when their busy season hits, they’re reaping the benefits of their SEO investment.

Seasonality may not impact when SEO is implemented, but it does impact our SEO strategy. Let’s say a new client just started an SEO campaign with us and their busy season is just around the corner. Rather than targeting the highly competitive terms that might take a year to rank for, we may decide to build credibility for less competitive keywords. This allows us to get some quick wins for the client as we ramp up for their busy season. Once the busy season is over, we may shift efforts to go after the more competitive keywords. We take into consideration all the possible factors before building an SEO campaign.

Inexperienced SEO firms will have a strong focus on long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are searches consisting of three to five words. These keywords often have low search volume and low competition. Are these keywords valuable? Absolutely, but they shouldn’t be your main focus.

When starting a campaign we like to identify keywords that will result in short-term wins for our clients. We do this while building credibility for the high search volume terms that are very competitive. We aren’t looking to get a small portion of the traffic. At Outpace we want to get our clients as much relevant traffic as possible. In doing so, our clients are seen as the go-to service provider in their area. This goal is only reached by going after the difficult keywords.

Achieving a higher number of visits and higher positions on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is impossible without analyzing who your competitors are and what they are doing to draw in the target demographic. After reflecting on your standing, looking at your competition helps us determine where the gap is, how that gap can be filled, and how we can outrank the competition.

Understanding what the competition is doing will give us some insight into what keywords they are targeting, but we don’t necessarily want to copy their strategy. Just because a business is ranked #1 doesn’t mean their SEO strategy is the best. Businesses ranked at the top of the results are often ranked there because they have been investing in SEO for years, but that doesn’t mean that their strategy doesn’t have inefficiencies. The key here is to identify what the competition is doing and identify how we can one-up the competitors in the long run.

By understanding the competition’s keyword strategy we can also identify where they aren’t ranking. This often leads to keyword opportunities for our clients. This low-hanging fruit helps us kick-start our SEO efforts as we begin any new SEO campaign.

Keyword research is best done by professionals with decades of experience. This knowledge comes from working with hundreds of clients across various industries. Most SEO firms are filled with people with a background in PR, advertising, and sales. Are those the people you want trying to rank you on Google? At Outpace we are proud our team consists of developers and computer scientists with years of experience programming. This programming mindset allows our team to identify and test factors that move our clients up in the search results year over year.

Outpace SEO emphasizes starting from the roots of your business by analyzing not only your existing website and your product or service but also your target market and your customer segment. We assess your current standing and even your competitors to develop a strategy for getting ahead of the competition.

1. Asking hard-hitting questions before starting keyword research – Before helping your businesses grow through SEO, we start by understanding you, your customers, and their goals. What you are ranking for and what your target audience is looking for are often two vastly different things. Focusing on your customer persona and then using the keyword data to draw an audience that converts is our primary goal.
2. What, Who, When, How, Why, and Where – We run our keyword research based on these questions to target keywords that will bring you customers — not just visitors.
3. Identify search volume – Understanding how frequently a given keyword is searched is crucial when prioritizing keywords across any SEO campaign.
4. Assess your current rankings – Knowing your current rankings helps us identify the amount of work and time needed to generate the ROI you expect from an SEO campaign.

SEO tactics can vary greatly depending on the campaign’s target market. Your target customer might be national or even international. Alternatively, your service area might be limited to certain countries, states, or cities. The terminologies to the same items vary widely according to where they live. Similarly, your business might require specialized SEO services like local SEO. We take into consideration all the various possible factors before building an SEO campaign around your target keywords.

The major categories of search intent are informational, navigational, and transactional. After finding your target keywords, mapping them to your web pages, and identifying the content gap on your pages, we fill in your content gap while ensuring that we format the content to match your searcher’s intent. Our SEO efforts are not only limited to your website traffic but also your customer conversions.