Keyword research is a search engine optimization practice used by SEO professionals to find out and research other alternative search terms entered in the search engine by people while looking for similar subjects of interest. Keyword research is generally opted to identify and achieve a higher ranking in search engines. 

Importance of Keyword Research

Keyword research helps you to identify which keywords should be targetted in your website’s content and how to build your content in order to satisfy the users and search engines. The power of your keyword depends on knowing your niche. 

Keyword research can help you with questions like what users are searching for, how many people are searching for it and how they want that information.

Discovering keywords 

You will have a few keywords in your mind which you want to rank for. These keywords may be related to your products, services or any other topics mentioned on your website. You can enter your terms in the keyword research tool to check and discover similar keywords or the average. You will notice that the search volumes for those keywords will vary tremendously while you are in the process of discovering relevant keywords. Both high and low competition keywords can be beneficial for your website. Researching more about search volumes can help you choose keywords that will give your website a boost to rank higher 

The following are some of the various tools for discovering keywords.

1. Ubersuggest 
2. Google search suggestions 
3. Alternative search suggestion (Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, DogPile)
4. Google Adwords keyword planner tool (competitions, global monthly searches, local monthly searches, 
5. Approximate CPC
6. Moz keyword explorer 
7. Google trends 
8. AnswerThePublic
9. Ahref Keyword Explorer 
10. SEMrush

Analyze and choose the best 

1. If your website is offering products or services, you need to go with keywords that have the most profitable intent in your current ranking websites. Whereas If your website contains blogs or any informational content, then it’s better to go with keywords that have more information based intent. 
2. Analyze the spot to fit in a high search volume keyword in conjunction with low competition.
3. Look at keywords with high search volume against top competitors.
4. If in case your website is already ranking on the first page of the search engine, but not in the top 5 results or on other search results like images or local results and your keywords have good search volume, then focus on adding only those keywords and phrases in your content.