The Fundamentals of Keyword Research for Blogging/Websites and Marketing. The Basics on How To Grow with SEO and Keyword Planning

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing actual search terms that people enter into search engines. The insight you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy, as well as your larger marketing strategy.

Keyword research for blogging is vital because using the right keywords can bring a great deal of organic traffic through your site. Making sure you have an optimal number of keywords in your blog also helps improve the relevance of the publication.

Keywords are the triggers that tell Google what your content is about and how relevant it is. It is important to know how to use keywords and which ones to use for the best possible result. Too many keywords used sporadically can actually hurt your ranking. That means you need to find a way to naturally incorporate them throughout your content so Google’s crawlers can make sense of them.

I won't make this article too long and unnecessary, so let's get to the point.

Why is keyword research important?

Keyword research isn't just about verifying how many searches a particular keyword has — it's also about exploring the many varied ways that people use language to research an idea or topic. As such, researching popular keywords isn't just a big part of search engine optimization, it's also a major element of content marketing as a whole. Why? Because it can help you find ideas for your next blog post, learn more about the needs of your audience, and keep up to date with the lingo of the ever-changing search landscape. Ultimately, by researching the words people type into search engines, and using this research to create targeted content, you can drive the right traffic to your site, traffic that is more likely to convert.

How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy

Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.

Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas, what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? Grab a piece of paper or your notes software and brainstorm ideas that you think answer current and future readers' questions and problems.

Look at threads in online communities, check industry forums to see what questions your customers are asking and how they phrase them. You can also check Facebook groups and other social media platforms.

Fill in those topic buckets with keywords

Identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.

You can run a keyword search in your niche to find out what topics you've been discussing since the early 2000s to date - chances are they'll hit topics in the future as well.

Research related search terms.

If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, go to Google and take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.

Check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords in each bucket.

Head terms are keywords phrases that are generally shorter and more generic, they're typically just one to three words in length, depending on whom you talk to. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are longer keyword phrases usually containing three or more words.

Long-tail keywords are “unpopular” (i.e., low Volume) and highly-focused search queries that tend to convert exceptionally well.

See how competitors are ranking for these keywords.

Understanding what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for is a great way to help you give your list of keywords another evaluation. If your competitor is ranking for certain keywords that are on your list, too, it definitely makes sense to work on improving your ranking for those. However, don’t ignore the ones your competitors don’t seem to care about. This could be a great opportunity for you to own market share on important terms, too.

Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner to cut down your keyword list.

Use the Keyword Planner to flag any terms on your list that have way too little (or way too much) search volume, and don't help you maintain a healthy mix like we talked about above. But before you delete anything, check out their trend history and projections in Google Trends.

Great Keyword Tools and How To Use them

A great tool for initial keyword research is Ahrefs. One of Visme’s most popular features is the infographic tool. We will use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to look up “infographic” (you can replace this with your relevant keyword). Click the Search Suggestions option on the left bar.

We want to look at the Keyword Difficulty, Clicks, and Cost per Click. According to Ahrefs, here are the definitions of those terms:

• Keyword Difficulty (KD): Estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a given keyword in a given location.
• Clicks: refers to the average monthly number of clicks on the search results that people make while searching for the target keyword.
• Cost Per Click (CPC): shows the average price that advertisers pay for a click on their ad in paid search results for a target keyword in a given country.

Ideally, we want to prioritize target keywords that have the following conditions:

• Lowest KD: The reason is simple because it takes less effort in terms of blogger outreach and link building to get your content ranked on the first page.
• Highest Number of Clicks: The reason why I picked clicks instead of volume, is that no matter how many searches a certain keyword gets, it’s not going to help your traffic if only a small percentage are going to click on the results (due to feature snippets, etc., that users get their answer right in the results page without having to go to any web pages).
• Highest CPC: Advertisers don’t normally spend their money where there’s no clear ROI, that’s why a keyword’s CPC is a pretty good indicator of buyer intent.

You can figure out what keywords work, all by yourself, OR you can make the process a little easier by seeing what is working for your competitors.

Under Site Explorer, first, look up your domain and click on Competing Domains. It shows you all the domains that are competing with your website in terms of organic search.

Now click Content Gap to put in a few domains of your closest competitors, and toggle the At least one of the targets should rank in the top 10 option. Click on Show keywords.

Now, choose the number of competitors you entered as intersect to see the keywords all of the competitors rank for (in my experience that normally yields the most relevant results), and sort based on Volume.

The trick with keyword research is to take advantage of a niche that is not heavily saturated. Especially when you are just starting out with creating content, it is hard to earn traffic if no one can find your content. Building your blog’s reputation over time will allow you to broaden your topics and reach greater streams of traffic. If you’re not willing to pay for Ahrefs, try another great alternative like KeywordTool.io.