It's not like all digital marketing revolves around Google: you, working in the field, certainly already know that very well.
But it is not possible to do digital marketing without going through Google. In fact, it is possible, but you will be leaving aside one of the most accessed channels today.
Not one, two: Google and YouTube.
Keyword research is how you communicate with Google. Keywords themselves are the language of the search engine. It’s how your users interact with it — and advertisers, too.
Understanding how to do keyword research means online russian phone number understanding how to make the most of Google in your strategies.
But there are two main ways to do research: one for organic traffic, the other for paid traffic. We will talk about both here in this text.
Come with me? First the most basic:
What are keywords on Google?
Keywords are the terms used by users when searching on Google.
For example: if you want to find something about content marketing, you would search for “content marketing” on Google.
So, “how to do performance marketing” is your keyword. This keyword will display a SERP, or Search Engine Results Page.
Basically this:
Up there is the keyword. And the page it opens is the SERP.
These keywords are often divided into two broad categories: long-tail and short-tail.
They have pretty obvious differences on the surface, but these differences become more and more subtle as you start doing keyword research for your strategies.
Therefore, before the text delves further into the research itself, it is worth talking a little more about these main differences.
Follow below:
Long Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are, as the name suggests, longer than other keywords. They are often used when someone is in doubt about something very specific.
For example, instead of searching just for “content marketing”, the user searches for “content marketing for small businesses”.
These keywords are often more effective in SEO work done in conjunction with a blog to generate leads.
This is because they have this characteristic of being aimed at Top of Funnel research. In most cases, those who use long-tail keywords are looking to resolve a doubt, not necessarily buy a product now.
Because of this, long-tail keywords are essential for an Inbound Marketing strategy , which uses them to generate leads and insert them into the Marketing Funnel.
At the same time, people searching for keywords like “performance marketing in Niterói”, for example, also need to receive related ads if you are a content marketing agency in Niterói.
In these cases, keyword research for paid media can also use long-tail keywords for more strategic searches.
The biggest advantage these keywords have in paid media is their price. They are usually much cheaper than short-tail keywords , since long-tail keywords tend to have a lower search volume and therefore cost less.
Short Tail Keywords
Short-tail keywords are simpler, typically a single word or a compound word.
“Digital marketing” is one example. “Content marketing” is another. These keywords tend to have a lot of features in Google’s own SERP and a lot of competition for the top organic positions.
See an example below:
These keywords also end up generating much more complete results. This text from Rock Content received its last update in 2020, but it has been at the top for many years.
This is by far one of Rock Content's most complete texts, and when it was published, Google highly valued long content. Because of this, for a long time this text had more than 10,000 words.
But what’s the big appeal of these short-tail keywords? Simple: they get hundreds of thousands of searches per month.
Long-tail searches rarely exceed 10,000 monthly searches, and the overwhelming majority of them do not even reach 1,000.
Because of this huge amount of searches, short-tail keywords also end up having the highest price in PPC auctions on the Google Ads Display Network.
And on the organic side, they are the ones that have the highest number of searches. Placing your text where Rock Content's is today for this PC is such an intense task and will take so long that it becomes practically impossible.
But when to use one keyword and when to use another? Hard to say. It all depends on your strategy.
I have separated one last item on this below. After that, we will get into the practice of how to do good keyword research:
Which one to use?
It is very difficult to determine which is the best strategy to work between short tail and long tail. It all depends on the moment.
Typically, companies that are just starting out in organic traffic with content marketing tend to target long-tail keywords to get results faster.
Then, as the strategy progresses, the website gains its first backlinks and its texts appear in the top positions, these brands take a risk on the short tail.
That's in organic. In ads it's a little different.
Typically, ads target more localized and direct keywords at the beginning of the strategy, but also create campaigns for short-tail keywords if the investment is adequate.
Companies that want to start with the best possible results will fall straight for the short-tail keywords, but without leaving the long-tail ones aside.
These are proportions: depending on your budget, you determine how many short-tail ads you will have versus how many long-tail ads you will have.
The more a brand has to invest in advertising, the more it will look for short-tail keywords, which bring more visitors but are much more expensive.