What do you think is the best way to determine what consumers want to buy? Their age? Maybe their ethnicity? Their location? While these factors can provide a small indication of what people want, the best way to find out what people want is by examining the keywords they utilize on search engines.

Keywords are the terms and phrases consumers search for when they want information on services or products. For example, if you were looking for a pizza place near you, you may search for, "best pizza". In this scenario, "best pizza" would be a keyword.

Now, "best pizza" is a relatively short keyword. Shorter keywords are called short-tail keywords, and longer ones are long-tail keywords. The length of the keywords searched also tells digital marketers a lot. Specifically, it lets you know how far along a customer is in their purchasing process. Let’s look at an example.

Say you’re in the market for a new lawnmower. You’ve been using the same lawnmower for years and it finally gave out. You don’t know much about lawnmowers so when you being the process, you search up "cheapest lawnmower".

As you can see, after the first few results which are all paid search results (we’ll get to those later), there’s an article that lists 10 of the best cheap lawnmowers. You read the article and you decide you want After you have conducted a bit of research, you have come to the decision that you want the Greenworks 25022 Corded Lawn Mower. Once you search for that, you find the prices that different vendors are selling it for. However, notice how much longer this keyword is compared to our original "cheapest lawnmower". This is a great example of how, generally, the longer a keyword is, the further along the customer is in the purchase process.

So how do you know what a good keyword is? Good keywords that you want to target should have a high search volume, but there isn’t a certain amount that must be searched in order to be considered a good keyword. Some industries simply do not get as much search volume as others. This means you have to figure out what a high and a low number of searches are for your particular industry. You can do this by utilizing keyword research tools, such as the Keyword Planner from Google Ads. This tool makes it very easy to see what keywords in your industry are being searched the most.

So what’s the point of finding out what people search the most? Once you determine all the good keywords that you can target, now it is time to create and optimize your content accordingly. This means creating great content that utilizes those keywords naturally. That is the goal of keyword research; determining which keywords to target, and utilizing them in creative ways on your site.