The importance of Keyword Research in your SEO strategy

At the end of last year, Google's web trend analyst, John Mueller, said that keywords in titles were no longer important to help positioning, leaving almost all SEO experts on the edges of their seats during his "Google Webmaster Central" hangout. What John meant was not that you stop putting keywords in your H1's, but that this action, by itself, will not be useful if not accompanied by others, such as adding a structured data scheme, uploading content to your Youtube channel in relation to your business, or doing an excellent job of local SEO according to your geographical location, to give some examples.
 
We must be able to anticipate a user's search intention and guess what they want to find in the results. How do we do this? Simple: through good keyword research.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is done in order to find words or phrases that the target audience of our product uses and searches in search engines. Subsequently, these keywords will serve us both to optimize and create the content of our digital products, using keywords in our titles, texts, call-to-actions, metadata, etc.. In short, keyword research allows us to find out which keywords are relevant in order to position our product. Sometimes the immensity of this process can be overwhelming, here are some ways to approach it.

The basis of keyword research

A good way to get started with keyword research is to make a list of topics related to your product or business that may be of interest to your target audience. Note that these topics are not directly related your keywords, they are just the starting point for finding them. For example, if you sell yoga courses that are taught at your local center, your topics could be the different types of yoga that are taught in those courses. In this case, if you search for "yoga" in Wikipedia, in the table of contents you will find good ideas of more specific subtopics from which good keywords can be derived.

If you search for those more specific subtopics in Google now and go directly to the bottom of the first page, you'll find that it already gives you a clue as to some related searches that users have done before. You must take these searches into account if you want to add them to your keyword list.

Another trick is to search for some of your keywords and key phrases by adding the word "forum", to see which queries users make most frequently; don't forget that we want to be positioned by those words that users really search for, not by those that we think they should search in relation to our business.

Other Helpful Tips  

Some other free websites and non-Google extensions that offer extensive keyword listings and keyword data are KWFinder, Keywords Everywhere, Keyword Shitter (I didn't name it), Keyword IO, or Ubersuggest, which you can consult and use as you see fit, until you find one that suits you best. I won't go into detail about each of these because this article would be too long, but all of the aforementioned are a few tools used daily by SEO experts around the world.

It is also worth mentioning that to measure the performance of these words, you can use free Google tools such as the Keyword Planner or Google Trends. 

If you have a budget, among the most recommended paid tools that offer an exhaustive analysis and study in relation to keywords is SEMRush. This platform saves you time because it allows you to see very detailed and extensive information about your competitors and their paid campaigns, which can be crucial in generating your keyword strategy both for organic positioning of your site and for your possible marketing campaigns. 

As a paid alternative, Ahrefs also has a good keyword search section with detailed information on each word, not just a generic listing.