If you want your website pages and other content (videos, images, blog posts, etc.) to get seen in search engine results, you need to do some diligent keyword research.
Your target audience is entering all kinds of phrases and questions into search engines. If you want to generate quality leads, then you MUST know what they are searching for online. Then you need to optimize your content so that your target audiences sees it in search results and clicks through to your website.
Keyword research is also critical to properly structuring your website so that Google understands what your site is about and which pages are the most important.
So, you not only need to optimize your web pages, but you need to properly group and link those pages. Google can then properly index your URLs, and users can easily click throughout your site. The more users click around your site, the more Google sees it as an authority site and ranks it higher in search results. Learn more about site structure.
Do not create web pages, blog posts, videos, image alt tags, etc. without doing keyword and audience research.
Do the necessary work up front in order to avoid potentially wasting hundreds or even thousands of hours and dollars trying to get in the top 3 in Google search results for a particular keyword phrase only to find out that you have virtually no chance of ranking that high due to the competition.
You could also discover that what you THINK your target audience might be interested in or is searching for online, is far from the reality.
Use the following tools to discover the following about your prospects: What are they searching for? What questions are they asking? What types of content do they like? How difficult will it be for you to rank for the keywords they're using?
How well optimized is the competition? What content hasn't been created yet for specific keywords? E.g. if there's not a video for a specific keyword phrase, then you could do a video around that keyword phrase and get on the first page.
Here's an example: Let's say you want to rank for dog collars. After using some of the tools below, you find out that tons of content has already been created for dog collars and that big brands rank all over the first page of Google search results. "Swim away!"
