10 benefits & drawbacks of keyword research in detail

Hi, I am Praneeth.

In this blog, you will learn 10 pros and cons of keyword research.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

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What is the keyword research process?

Keyword research is a process of finding phrases that people search in google and other search engines to learn the details about something or know the answer to some query in google and other search engines.

10 pros and cons of keyword research.

Here are 10 pros and cons of keyword research.

5 Pros:

Here is a quick overview of the pros of keyword research.

1. New ideas and insights.
2. It helps you know & analyze your competition better.
3. It gives you a direction.
4. It is a wonderful skill.
5. Engaged audience.

Let’s learn the advantages in detail.

• New ideas and insights.

With keyword research, you will have new ideas and topics you can write about and target keywords on your blog and a new fresh opportunity to rank on search engines.

With these, you can have more chances of getting organic traffic along with more blog and brand visibility in google because search engines like to google love content.

And by doing keyword research you will have more ideas and topics you can write about in your blog.

Another thing about keyword research is that you can get to know more about your target audience

You can know what is it that they are looking for with keyword research.

With better keyword research you can find those gaps in your niche which you can fill with your resources better and gain more visitors to your online business.

With keyword research, you will get to know exactly how many clicks people are clicking and what is the age of the audience who are searching for the keyword and various other metrics in different keyword tools.

When you know what’s your ideal targeted audience is around your niche & what they are looking for on search engines.

You can have a chance to target those specific phrases and grab your audience on your blog and convert them into potential long-lasting loyal customers to your business.

With keyword research, you always know the industry trends and new insights into your target market, you are always updated with that.

Another advantage of keyword research is that you can find new keywords for your existing blogs and you can add them to your existing blogs, update them, and rank them for more organic traffic.

• It helps you know & analyze your competition better.

With keyword research, you can know in detail who exactly you are up against.

We do keyword research to rank on search engines and get more traffic to our SEO and PPC campaigns.

With keyword research, you can better understand and analyze your competition in the niche you are in.

Well, what’s the advantage of knowing your competition?

By knowing and analyzing your competitors.

You can know their strengths and weaknesses.

You can analyze what keywords your competitors are ranking for on search engines and you can target those with better resources than your competitors.

By knowing who you are up against gives you an idea of your competitor’s strategies, their business models which you can replicate with better-modified versions.

Here is an example of what I mean.

For example, you are blogging on a niche of sports shoes.

You have a keyword called sports shoes for children.

When you google this keyword you can find the websites that are ranking for the keyword and you know with better keyword research you can find the competitors better and find their practices.

Without doing keyword research for your niche you will not have the exact detail of your competitors and without knowing who you are up against it is the same as going to the battlefield blindfolded.

• It gives you a direction.

With keyword research, you will have a clear direction and a precise path to walk on.

You know which direction to move on.

If you don’t do keyword research you might blog on any topic you wish and want to without knowing your ability to rank for it or not.

By blogging on any topic you wish to blog on your website you will end up tired, fatigued, frustrated, and still,

You will not see growth because google ranks websites more which blog on topics in a single niche than on any niche and topic.

It is a simple thing the lesser your focus on a single thing is the higher your expertise is on the subject and the better quality content you can deliver to search engines.

With keyword research, you can save a lot of your time, effort, and money on your SEO efforts.

Doing proper keyword research which is the rock foundation for any blog online can make your blog grow immensely fast.

You can measure your growth and rankings on search engines through keyword research for your blogs by targeting them in your blogs.

• It is a wonderful skill.

Well, keyword research is the most important part of SEO and PPC.

SEO and PPC are one of the most important types of marketing in digital marketing.

Which basically means,

If you master keyword research better you have a lot of opportunities open to succeed.

You can start an SEO agency and consult people and do SEO for them and earn money.

You can hire brands and companies and manage their websites and get traffic and earn money.

With that keyword research helps you gain a lot of knowledge about different niches and websites and you can find those gaps which you can fill by creating your own websites and earn money as a side hustle.

Ultimately keyword research is a great skill you can have in the digital marketing world.

If you are wondering if SEO is dead or not worth it in 2020 or beyond, read my guide on SEO.

• Engaged audience.

Well, I have mentioned earlier,

With keyword research, you can have a clear direction for your blogging journey and SEO effort.

The big advantage of keyword research is that you can have people and audiences engagement on your website.

Instead of blogging on any topic,

You get in your head by doing keyword research properly and writing highly relevant and quality content on your blog over a particular query,

You are creating a chance of making your audience stay engaged on your website.

By answering questions about what people are searching for on your blog gives the audience to stay on your website and read your blogs rather than reading what advice you want to give other people.

You can have more increased brand awareness with keyword research along with more chances of getting organic traffic and social traffic to your blog.

With that said here are 5 cons of keyword research.

5 Cons:

These are not essentially cons of keyword research they are mostly wrong practices people do and think about when talking about keyword research, lets know the cons overview first.

1. Giving too much emphasis on search engines, not users.
2. Not analyzing the trend of the keyword.
3. Ignoring long-tail keywords.
4. Relying too much on the tools for the research.
5. It’s not about keywords, it is queries & topics.

Let’s learn the disadvantages and cons of keyword research in detail.

• Giving too much emphasis on search engines, not users.

Keyword research is the most important part of SEO for any website.

But the disadvantage of extensive keyword research is that you start giving more focus on search engines over users.

You start practicing a lot of shady SEO practices like keyword stuffing and adding lots of irrelevant keywords in your bog which has nothing to do with your blogpost just aiming for higher rankings.

This mentality of focusing on search engines over users will create a bad user experience on the website and can lead to penalties from Google for using bad SEO practices like keyword stuffing and adding irrelevant keywords.

This is one of the big disadvantages of keyword research is giving too much preference to search engines over users.

• Not analyzing the trend and search intent of the keyword.

The problem with keyword research is that people just blindly go with targeting keywords as soon as they find one in which they see high volume and low difficulty in the tools.

But the problem with this approach which most people follow is that.

You don’t know the trend and search intent of the keyword.

If you target seasonal keywords then your work and effort on the keywords and topics on your blog are going to get traffic only for a limited amount of time, not year long and that’s not the thing you should be focusing on in your blog.

By the way, you can check the trend of the keyword through google trends.

Another thing is that,

In 2020, It is not about keywords it is about matching search intent.

Well if you don’t know what search intent means.

It is that what the searcher is looking for typing the keyword or phrase in Google.

For example,

Here is a keyword

what is an SEO campaign?

The intent of the keyword is that searcher is looking to learn about what is SEO campaign.

But,

If you find this keyword with low difficulty which it is not and target this keyword with the wrong article like a comparison between SEO and PPC or different SEO campaigns.

You are not matching the searcher’s intent.

The user wants information about the SEO campaign what is it and types of it not the difference between SEO and PPC.

When you don’t match the searcher intent, even if you rank high on google with more backlinks.

You will have a more bounce rate and that affects your rankings significantly.

Because you are not answering the question people are searching for on google and when you don’t answer the question exactly what people are searching for,

More people bounce from your website to other websites on google, it gives Google a signal that users are not happy with your result so it will downrank you.

That is the reason it is very important to understand the searcher’s intent.

Basically, There are 4 types of searcher intent.

Here is a perfect table of different searcher intent with examples.

You can also find the search intent of the keyword by just searching the keyword in google and analyzing the top 10 results.

If the majority of the top 10 results of the particular keyword are information articles then you should create an informative article on the keyword and if the majority are reviews and comparisons, you should follow it and vice versa.

It is very important to understand and act on the search intent of the keywords, not just keywords in general.

• Ignoring long-tail keywords.

Source: Neil Patel.

This is not a disadvantage of keyword research as it is a major keyword research mistake that you should avoid.

You need to understand something called longtail and shorttail keywords.

If you don’t know what these actually are,

These are the number of words in keywords, if there are 3 or more words in a keyword it is a longtail keyword and if there are less than 3 words it is a shorttail keyword and if there is only 1 word it is called a head term keyword.

A perfect example of a short tail keyword is,

Seo campaign.

The good thing about short tail keywords is that a lot of people who use Google search for the keyword so it is very competitive.

But the problem is it is the search intent of the keyword is not clear.

When a user searches SEO campaign the intent is not clear, you don’t know what the searcher wants,

Does he want to read an article or join an SEO agency?

But, with long-tail keywords, it is not the case,

Take an example of longtail keywords.

Seo campaigns for beginners.

This is a long-tail keyword as there are 3 or more words there in the keyword.

The good thing about this keyword is you know search intent for better.

With keywords like this,

The searcher is looking for SEO campaigns for beginners so there are more chances of turning the audience into leads.

Obviously fewer people will search for this but you know the search intent of the keyword better.

With longtail keywords, people tend to convert better into leads and sales.

Take a deep look at the example.

SEO campaigns for beginners.

It is the keyword and the searcher is looking for specific SEO campaigns for beginners and he can covert better and you as a publisher can turn the audience into potential customers by getting him to purchase your info product or any affiliate product.

You should know something very important here.

If you think longtail keywords have low search volume and it is useless to target these long-tail keywords.

Let me tell you something,

• 15% of searches on google are new and never searched before.

With this, when you target the longtail keywords and rank for them which mostly has less competition to rank for on search engines.

You will rank for similar other terms on google not just your target keyword on google.

This is called semantic search.

Here is a perfect example of what I mean,

Here is a  keyword

Blogging mistakes.

The top-ranking blog for this keyword is Hubspot.

By searching for this keyword in the Moz keyword tool.

You know this blog is ranking for over 1000 other terms on google.

Hence you should focus on longtail keywords that most people ignore.

Hence the conclusion can be drawn as to focus on targeting more on long-tail keywords which most people ignore which you can target for more conversions and leads.

• Relying too much on tools for keyword research.

Whenever you think about keyword research people just think it is about investing in these expensive tools like,

1. Ahrefs.
2. Moz.
3. Semrush.

It is nothing wrong with that but the problem is that keyword research is not just limited to keyword research tools.

Sadly most people limit themselves with tools without acting on the data manually.

What I mean by this is,

Whenever you get a keyword suggestion in your keyword tool.

You need to check the actual SERP of the keyword in Google to find out who you are up against for that keyword.

What you should exactly look for are forums and low-quality results ranking in the top 10 of the keyword you are going after in search engines.

This is called competition analysis and you can’t completely rely on rough numbers as a competition of keywords.

Watch this video to get to know how to do competition analysis of keywords other than keyword tool data.

If you see lots of pages from authority websites like Forbes and inc which are exactly on point to what you have searched in.

You better ignore the keyword because it takes more time and effort for you to rank in Google for that specific keyword.

This all data of competition of the keyword you will not get through typical keyword tools.

Most keyword tools analyze the keyword’s competition based on its backlinks which is not the best measurement for the competition.

Another thing you should look after is that,

Don’t target keywords that are answered instantly on featured snippets.

Well, I am talking about keywords such as,

1. What’s the weather of a particular location x.
2. What’s the calculation of this and this.
3. Product reviews and comparisons.

Most of these types of keywords don’t result in any SEO clicks because google answers them right on the featured snippets.

When you get an answer for any question on google right on the search results page in snippet why would you bother clicking to any other website for more unless you want more information?

Even this too you need to check it manually which most people ignore because you will not get this data in keyword tools in most cases.

The ultimate goal is to check the actual SERP of the keyword you are going after in google before targeting the keyword by yourself.

• It’s not all about keywords, it’s about queries & topics.

This one is closely related to the search intent of the keyword.

The disadvantage of keyword research is that you are limited to keywords and words in general.

What you should look for is queries of people.

If you are targeting different keywords all related to the same query on different pages it is not worth it as it creates more harm than good for your blog.

Read keyword cannibalization in detail here.

What you should focus on instead is to answer the different queries of people in different articles of your blog rather than different keywords all targeting the same query.

Here is an example,

1. Benefits of SEO,
2. SEO advantages.
3. Search engine optimization pros and cons.

There are 3 different keywords but basically all targeting the same query which is the benefits of SEO.

So instead of focusing on keywords turn your focus on queries and topics.

Ending remarks.

There you go I have answered all the queries regarding the pros and cons of keyword research for SEO.

Comment down on how do you perform keyword research for your blog and website.

Share the blog with your family and friends if you found it helpful, sharing is caring.

Read my other blogs,

• Is SEO worth it?
• Advantages and disadvantages of google.
• Why blogs are important for SEO and business?

I will catch you next time,

Till then keep learning and keep growing.