The Importance of Keyword Research Before a Website Launch

Most local businesses don’t even consider keyword research when planning a website.

Keyword research is one of the essential factors in building a new website. However, a lot of website owners tend to do this after their site launch. For some, keyword research is entirely out of their to-do list. In this article, we’ll talk about why keyword research is important, why you should do it before you start building your website, and how to do it properly.

Importance of Keyword Research for Website SEO

Keywords play a significant role in SEO. If you’re able to include keywords that potential customers use in their search queries, then there’s a good chance that your website will get a good amount of traffic. And what does more traffic mean? More leads and conversions. If you target the best keywords that relate to your business, you’ll attract quality leads. Encouraging these leads that are interested in your product/service in the first place is going to be easier.

Planning about aesthetics, website speed, and other functional elements can be more interesting than finding a bunch of keywords. But if you want to have a successful SEO strategy for your website, keyword research should be at the top of your list.

Why You Should Perform Your Research Before Website Launch

When is the best time to do keyword research?

When you build a durable infrastructure, it’s crucial to have a solid foundation. It’s the same thing when it comes to building a website. You need a strong starting point, and keyword research provides precisely that. You need to do keyword research before launching your website. Let’s expand on that.

You need to research the keywords to know and organize the pages that are going to be on your website. By doing the research, you’ll learn what topics your potential customers are looking for. You can then create content that interests your audience. Your website build will be streamlined as you have the knowledge you need to make it as effective as possible.

What happens if you do the research after setting up your website? Let’s look at the consequences if you opt for this option:

• First, you’ll not be able to optimize your website as soon as possible. We all know what other people say: the sooner, the better. If you don’t do keyword research right from the start, your website will not immediately get organic traffic after its launch. On the other hand, if you research your keywords as the first step of website building, your site will gradually gain organic traffic as soon as you finish setting it up.

• Second, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to rework everything you’ve made on your website if you choose to do keyword research and implement your findings after your website goes live.

• Lastly, revising your website will result in spending not only more money but also time and effort. If you want to be practical, prioritizing keyword research at the first stages of your website building will help you save on these highly valuable resources significantly.

Keyword Research Best Practices

We’ve discussed keyword researching’s importance and when you should carry it out, but it doesn’t stop there. Let’s talk about the best part – how to do keyword research properly.

1. Think about what the audience wants

You need to learn why people search for a particular topic to help you generate the best keywords and ideas for your website. Learn about the intent behind their search queries. This will create ideas for planning your content aimed to solve the problems of these potential customers.

2. Choose Primary and Supporting Keywords

Now that you know your audience’s search intent, it’s time to identify whether these keywords are primary or supporting. It’s essential to have these two as they allow you to target everyone regardless of where they are in the funnel. For example, your primary keywords will help you create and curate content for the people in the top part of the funnel. When it comes to the other parts of the funnel where specific and unique keywords are needed, your supportive keywords will help you with that.

3. Analyze what your competitors are doing

This is a no brainer. It’s great if you have your system of doing things, but it also doesn’t hurt to look at your competitors. Analyze how they do things, think of ways to do better, and be several steps ahead of the game.

4. Understand how search features work

If you want to perform keyword research correctly, then you need to know how keywords work on the search results. There are search features that can affect your rankings, and you must know about them.