By Harry Mackin

Successfully ranking for the keywords you’re targeting won’t make much of an impact on your business if those keywords are not relevant to your audience and their buying journey. In fact, many companies end up wasting a lot of time and resources in this pursuit. That’s why a smart, thoughtful and data-driven keyword strategy is paramount to an effective SEO strategy.

Fortunately, you have everything you need to start conducting keyword research and setting your strategic direction now.

How to research keywords for your B2B SEO strategy

By following this step-by-step process, you can start figuring out what your audience wants to find, how they’re looking for it, and how you show up for them in the search results.

Check your current rankings

Before you start researching keywords, it’s always wise to run an SEO audit of your current rankings as step one. This can provide a baseline of what your website is showing up, which can help you understand where search engines view your domain as authoritative. 

Checking your website’s SEO rankings is fairly straightforward, and there is a wide variety of both free and paid online tools you can use to do it. 

Conduct a competitive analysis

An SEO competitor analysis is a review of how your competitors are showing up in search. This concerns not only business competitors (i.e. companies competing for your customers) but also SERP competitors (i.e. companies competing for your target keywords), which are not always the same. 

This process can tell you a lot about how competitors are approaching their keyword strategies – and how you can differentiate yours or overtake key rankings.

Look for opportunities using a gap analysis

As you’re analyzing competitors, keep an eye out for any opportunities they’ve missed – or “gaps” in their SEO footprint. These include topics that they aren’t showing up for, but that customers in your solution category are searching for.

An SEO gap analysis can be a great place to start your search, surfacing keywords your competition may have overlooked entirely. Many online SEO tools and expert partners can help you quickly surface gaps in your competition’s keyword strategy. At TopRank, we develop keyword glossaries that list competitor rankings for each keyword alongside your own rankings to easily see where you can fill in the blanks for your audience and build share of search.

Bonus: Create a topical map 

In modern SEO, it’s very important to demonstrate topical authority by covering priority subjects in depth and at length. You want search engines like Google to recognize your domain’s expertise and focus on a topical area by covering as many facets of it as possible, creating and cross-linking content for the core keyword as …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron