After having learned about SEO and having known the importance of keywords in ranking higher on search results, it's time to explore the types of keywords and where they are used. In general, there are 9 types of keywords. Any website begins its keyword research with seed keywords that form the base content or category of the website. In practice, there may be multiple variations to the seed keywords but seed keywords form the basis of what content actually goes into the website and under which category you would want your website to rank. For instance, this blog has content around SEO, Adnetworks, Keywords, and others but the seed keyword would be digital marketing. As I would want my website to rank under this niche. There can be multiple seed keywords for a given website.
Let us understand the types of keywords.
Short-Tailed
These are keywords that consist of one to three words. They are also sometimes referred to as head keywords. They generally return large results during the search. For instance "digital marketing". As mentioned earlier this is the seed keyword for the website, which means seed keywords are short-tailed keywords.
Long Tailed
These are keywords that have more than 3 words. They are more detailed and may contain a phrase or a sentence. For instance "digital marketing companies in California".
Fresh
These are keywords that have not been searched in any query so far and are new keywords. For instance when COVID-19 hit the most searched keyword for "Coronovirus". This keyword was never searched before.
Evergreen
These are keywords that are always searched. Their search volume remains moderate and they are never outdated. For instance "new jobs in California"
There is always someone looking for a job and the market gets filled with new vacancies and people count looking for these jobs also do not go down.
Product Defining
These are keywords that are used to explain a product. For instance "Samsung smartphones with 64 GB memory". Here we are explicitly describing the product we need.
Customer Defining
These are keywords used to create a customer persona or profile. These keywords target a specific audience. For instance "jobs for women".
Geo-Targeting
These keywords are used to target based on city, state, or country. They are meant to look for region-specific results. For instance "jobs for women in California".
LSI
These are Latent Semantic Indexing keywords that form a semantic relationship with main keywords. For instance, "ball" has a semantic relation with the bat. While "bat" can have semantic relation with cricket or animal depending on context. You can see these main keywords have multiple related keywords which become a part of the search and they form LSI keywords.
Intent targeting
As the name suggests these keywords are based on user intent. In general, intent falls under three categories Informational, Commercial and Transactional. This means the query intent usually depends on the purchase funnel or the AIDA model. During the Information stage customer is searching for information regarding the product for example "best smartphones with 128GB memory", in the commercial stage they have decided to make a purchase for example "buy iPhone 13" and during the transactional stage, they are looking for more offers and competitive prices for example "cheapest prices for iPhone13".
Now that you have understood the different types of keywords and their practical usage, it will help you with further optimizing your website for search engines. For more on SEO and Keywords please read my blog.
