Unless you’re a completely new blogger or have been living under a rock you know that keywords are important to people finding your articles. Keywords defines the content’s direction to ensure that the content you end up with is easily searchable and relevant on Google. Therefore, having a keyword target is essential and directs your articles to having a consistent theme for your readers. It can be an involving task to figure out the keywords your target audience are looking for, and it entails a lot of details, numbers, and comparisons to isolate the correct long tail keywords. Therefore, it is necessary to do it well. Doing thorough keyword research forms the foundation for content development as well as an SEO strategy for your blog to help tie your articles together and improve interlinking. Keyword research entails analyzing and coming up with a list of useful keywords for use in your SEO copy writing to determine the likely hood your article will be found by other people looking for the topics you are writing about. Doing this effectively can help you prioritize what you write about and save you months or even years in building an audience for the blog you put so much time and thought into.

How Do You Effectively Do Keyword Research?

Develop a list

Have a list of essential and useful topics concerning what you know about your business. Come up with a list of topics you find helpful in your business. The topics help you to come up with certain keywords in the process. The issues will entail topics that come up in most of your conversations that you are particularly knowledgeable on that other people can benefit from your expertise. Put yourself in the buyer persona context and figure out what the target audience would be searching for from your business and structure your keywords and articles in a way that helps your audience solve a challenge they are encountering.

You can also use tools like SEMRush or ubersuggest seo tools to put in the web page URLs of similar sites and see what search keywords they are ranking well for and what the search difficulty is for those terms. Using this information can help you come up with your own keywords to include in your topic articles. You can also use keyword research to come up with topics and content ideas you might not have otherwise thought people were searching for.

Set Your Goals

A plan will always be successful if you have set goals you want to achieve at the end. Answering these questions can help you build goals for your website:

• You should try to understand what your brand is about?
• What makes your brand and content special?
• What mission do you want to deliver with your website?
• Do you want to increase the number of subscribers or the number of sales by a given date?

Defining goals helps to provide direction for your SEO strategy as well as plan. They can also be used to inform the purpose of the content as well as the SEO copywriting. Draft your goals that will help you get a framework for what you want to achieve for your blog and your audience.

Fill the Topics with Keywords

Now that you have some topics to focus on look for word phrases that people are searching for that align with the issues you enjoy writing about. The keywords should be centered around these topics you deem important. With high quality keywords you will be able to rank on the search engine results since new customers rely on these results to find useful resources.

Look for ways to incorporate words into your articles that your audience are likely to type while searching for something related to your topic. It is best to develop a list of keyword phrases ahead of time that potential clients might search for while looking for content concerning the topic.

One useful way of getting keyword ideas is to look at blogs that write about topics similar to what your blog’s niche will be and examine their titles and the structure of their articles to help answer their audiences questions.

Obviously don’t steal their keywords directly or their content but if you have a different viewpoint than a popular article or you can provide a more helpful and detailed article on a subject then that would be an excellent candidate for something to write about.

Know How Intent Affects Keyword Research

The user intent is the essential factor in giving you the ability to rank on search engines such as Google. Using keyword tools, keywords may appear to have a given meaning at face value. Still, the crucial bit should be on your ranking potential with your blogging experience, age of your blog, and the blogs domain authority rank. Therefore you will need to be careful about how you interpret a given keyword and how it relates to your audience. You will also have to be aware of how competitive specific keywords are.

If you want to write an article that another bigger and more popular blog has already written better than what you could then it is very unlikely your article will be listed high on search results and that people will even find it. In that case you may want to consider writing a different article or consider long tail keywords. Instead of writing an article on “How to ease backpain” which is a very broad search target and webmd owns the number one result, write an article on “How to ease backpain after a full day of golfing” or “How to ease knee pain after running a marathon”. This will allow you to focus on a specific audience for people searching for those topics and be more likely to rank your article highly.

Find Terms Related to The Keyword

If during your keyword research you find a target phrase that has very high search competition from more established blogs you may be able to use similar words to your original intention that are easier to rank. Consider the following set of similar keyword phrases:

• Hotels
• Best hotels
• Top hotels
• Cleanest Florida Hotels
• 4 star Hotels in Orlando Florida
• Great places to stay in Orlando Florida
• Best places to stay near Disney World with Pools
• Best places to stay near Disney World with Pools Under 150$

Here you can see I started with a very broad and competitive keyword and provide alternate search phrase ideas and make it more longtail to narrow down a target audience and provide more focus for the article.

Combine Both Short and Long-Tail Keywords

The short keywords entail between one to three words in length. The long-tail keywords entail more than three words and are more detailed like in the hotel example above. It is essential to have a balanced keyword strategy. The head terms are often searched, making them more competitive though it is more difficult for them to rank than the long-tail keywords. Short keywords boast the most search volume but are generally more vague and not as helpful to someone looking for specific information.

Use A Keyword Planner to Cut Down Your Keyword List

Once you have the your list of keywords, you should narrow down your list to several specific keywords to focus on. There are varying tools you can use to do this. Google keyword planner is one of them, and this tool will tell you the search volume and ranking difficulty for your target keywords. The keyword planner will also point out keywords that attract the least audience and enable you to deprioritize these. You can also use the Goggle trends tools to help you know which terms are trending upward to include in your blog to catch new audiences as they develop.

Best Keywords For SEO

It is worth noting that there are no best keywords guaranteed to get your blog 1000 views. But there are search phrases that will give you more views than writing articles without considering Search Engine Optimization through Keywords.

Therefore, it is upon you to develop a strategy that will help your content rank on search engines and drive traffic. The best keywords for your blog will also take into an account SEO strategy, authority as well as volume. Find keywords depending on the competition you are trying to beat and even your ability to give quality enough content to exceed what is currently ranking. After you get several articles that capture the number 1 to 3 spots in the search engines you will see your blog start having snowball growth. People finding these articles may even link to them in their own blogs which will one give you even more traffic and two help build your Domain Authority through backlinks. As your Domain Authority grows you will start seeing other articles you wrote also grow in rank generating an even bigger snowball!

Wrapping up

Now you have what it takes to get a list of keywords that will help you focus on the right topics that suit your business while giving you both short-term and long-term gains. You can keep evaluating the keywords to ensure if the potential results are worth the time of writing an article.

As you gain authority on the search engines, you can look for more keywords and add them to your list that may have been too competitive to rank for in the past. You can consider this leveling up your blog as it keeps growing and reaching more and more people, while extending you more opportunities to rank and grow influence.

Keywords are vital in giving direction of your blogs market strategy as well as the direction of the content that will help your growing online business. Therefore, any aspiring blogger should take the time to do keyword research for their niche before writing their articles to come up with keywords that could be low hanging fruit for getting traffic.