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Looking to boost organic results for your online course? Then a thorough keyword research is a necessity. Here's a handy guide to help you.
As an online tutor, you might have heard of the term SEO quite often than not while writing content for your courses. But have you ever wondered how it works or why are people running behind SEO all the time? We have answers to all your questions here.
To the uninitiated, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a practice followed by marketers to increase the quality and quantity of website traffic to their websites. In other words, you are popularizing your brand via organic efforts.
SEO is the bridge that connects you with your audience’s search behavior – what are they searching on the internet, the type of words they are using in their search, and so on. This helps you to give them exactly what they need.
Now keywords form the core of any SEO strategy. These are the words that your audience uses to search on the internet. Using the same words on your content will get you featured on the search engines and fetch you more organic traffic
In this blog, we will be specifically looking at keywords, how to do keyword research, and their benefits in online courses.
What is keyword research?
Though researching for words is considered a very basic step in SEO, you must understand that it is one of the biggest success factors in your content marketing efforts. The step primarily involves identifying words and phrases related to your business that your audience uses to search for a topic in the search engines.
Extensive research for keywords gives you an idea about the demand for the specific keywords and the importance of using them in your course content. Using these keywords in your content gives you a better chance of securing a higher rank on the search engine results and make your course website more visible to the audience.
How to do keyword research?
Doing keyword research is not rocket science. Every keyword research starts with an idea called the ‘seed keyword’. This initial idea comes from your audience expectations, or your knowledge on the subject, or from your peers in the industry.
Have a list of seeds ready before you start your actual analytical research. Once you have the list ready from various sources, you need to analyze the keyword for its popularity and rank on the search engine result pages (SERP).
To do this, we have a lot of keyword tools available on the internet. All you need to do is to feed your seed into the tool and it shows all the details for the keyword in terms of popularity, ranking, and also other related suggestions for a better rank.
Some popular keyword research tools include:
You can use any of these tools to perform thorough research about your seed ideas and build your content from them.
Benefits of keyword research in online courses
Doing keyword research has a lot of benefits for your online courses. Let us take a look at some of them here –
Takes you in the right direction
Creating quality content is an unavoidable activity in an online course and it goes without saying that SEO has an important role to play in it. When planning the content, doing keyword research points you in the right direction and suggests the most useful keywords to enrich your topic and make it accessible for people. Doing detailed keyword research makes you stay focused on your content quality.
Provides ideas for new topics
Identifying topics for online courses is probably the biggest challenge faced by any new instructor. Keyword researches help you in this by providing ideas for your next course topic. Each keyword suggestion can be converted into a separate topic of content. You can either post blogs or create a new course out of them. For example, if you perform a keyword analysis of the word ’hosting’, then you will get suggestions like SaaS, ISP, websites, etc. – each of which is a separate subject and you will have plenty to talk about them.
Makes you featured on top in the search engines
This is obviously the most important purpose of keyword research. Fine-tuning your keyword research will help you feature not only on Google but also on other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, etc. Try using long-tail keywords instead of short ones. This has a better effect on the visibility in search engines and also has a higher conversion rate.
Helps to analyze the competition
Doing research before starting your online course helps you to get a thorough idea about the keywords that your competition is using. Most of the keyword research tools offer a feature of finding the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can use the results to come up with better content for those keywords and rank higher than your competitors. Spyfu is a popular keywords tool to analyze your competitors.
Increases your earnings
The ultimate goal of any online course is to make it sellable and generate revenue out of it. Quality content always sells – This is a no-brainer. Thorough keyword research helps you come up with useful content that your target audience is expecting from you. Following even the basic SEO rules will help you come up with such content, which, in turn, will attract more students. The end result – better earnings.
Further Reading: SEO Guidebook: Meta Description or Meta Keywords
About Learnyst
Learnyst is a homegrown LMS that comes power-packed with features to create an online course. Apart from creating courses effortlessly, Learnyst also offers you the freedom to build your own branded website for your course through its Website Builder feature. And the best part, all the websites created in Learnyst are search engine optimized. All that you need to do is find the right keywords and let the platform do the grunt work for you.
To know more about Learnyst and its SEO feature, sign up for a free trial or contact our experts now.