SEO is one of the oldest and well-known forms of digital marketing strategies available online today. It has gone through plenty of changes and evolutions throughout the years when websites picked up on the idea of using SEO to get their websites noticed by online users. Back then, blackhat methods like keyword stuffing were very popular because of the results that website owners would get from this. Over the years, search engines have tweaked their algorithms to level the playing field and to make sure that online users are provided with only good quality content.

Because of these changes, website owners are making the effort to provide good quality and relevant keywords in order to help bump up their pages in search engine rankings and to make sure that their sites don’t get penalized for using unethical techniques, or the wrong keywords. Keyword research is a very significant part of any good SEO strategy.

Some people like to jump right into the content, but if you’re not doing good keyword research, then you may be wasting valuable time and effort marketing content that isn’t optimized for the right keywords. It might sound like plenty of work and time that can be better allocated elsewhere, but taking the time to put in the research and effort can really pay off if your website can reach the number one spot on search engine results.

The core of any good SEO strategy lies in the keywords that you use in your content. This is because the keywords are what users are using in order to find your page. If you’re using a keyword that has nothing to do with your website, and users find your page with that keyword, then they will bounce out of your website, resulting in a high bounce rate, and being potentially penalized by search engines. So it’s important that you know what you’re doing in terms of keyword research in order to prevent things from this from happening.

When doing your keyword research, make sure to make your keyword, as specific as possible. If you’re a shoe store for example, you probably won’t do so well if you’re aiming to rank with the keyword “women’s shoes”. There are millions of results for that keyword alone, and unless you’re a huge shoe store chain, your website is probably being buried underneath thousands of similar sites. If you narrow it down to “Lakeland FL custom women’s shoes”, then you’ll find that it narrows down the search considerably. It’s important to understand your niche, do your keyword research, and tailor your SEO strategy to work with the information that you have.