While it may seem like online marketing and SEO are constantly changing, some things have stayed pretty much the same since the beginning. Keyword research, and how important it is to creating great content and making sure that that content gets found online, is one of those things. No matter what your goal is, whether it’s to drive traffic to your website or to convert visitors into customers, keyword research lays the groundwork for achieving it.

What Is Keyword Research?

While at its heart, keyword research is simply the process of identifying which words and phrases people are using when searching for information online, it’s also much more than that. It’s through keyword research that you learn what your customers are thinking, how they’re feeling, and their intent when they search. Through keyword research, you can learn what your audience and customers actually want, so you don’t have to guess when it comes to planning your content.

Keyword Research Is More Than Just Keywords

Modern keyword research isn’t stuffing your content with as many keywords as you can. In fact, that’s a good way to run afoul of Google’s algorithm and earn a drop in the SERP rankings. What keyword research is instead is a blueprint. It’s the foundation that you’ll use to build your content strategy. Keywords are important, but unless you’re using them strategically, you may end up with content that just doesn’t land quite right with your audience.

How Does Keyword Research Guide Content Creation?

There are a number of ways in which keyword research should guide your content creation strategy:

1. Topic Selection

You shouldn’t choose which topics to write about in a vacuum. Keyword research lets you know what people are searching for. You can see the search volume for each keyword or key phrase that is relevant to your industry and find the sweet spot of popular but not so popular that your content would be drowned out in a sea of everyone else writing about the same thing.

2. Content Structure

Once you know what you’re writing about, your keyword research will go a step further and can help you plan out the structure of your content. For example, the title, headings, sub-headings, and more. Each sub-section on a webpage has a chance of ranking individually on Google, so it’s important to pay attention to these, too.

3. Discoverability

Google can’t match searchers with your content if there’s nothing linking the two together. That’s where keywords come in. A user searches for a particular keyword or phrase, and because that word or phrase is included in your content (especially if it’s in the title or a header), Google knows to pair users with your content. Without keywords, your content just isn’t as discoverable.

4. Low-Competition Keywords

Keyword research also helps you to identify gaps in your competitors’ content. Look for high search volume but low competition keywords–these are the ones that people are looking for but no one else is really writing about yet. That’s a gap you can take advantage of so that Google can send those users your way.

5. Content ROI

Without doing keyword research ahead of time, you may end up with a lot of content that just doesn’t perform very well. That’s because it was created based on guesswork. With keyword research, however, you can take the guesswork out of it and make each webpage more valuable because you already know people are searching for content like it.