Some key tips on keyword research for blogs
I have been recently glued to the results of the World Cup in Brazil. Schedules, recent team reports, team brackets, and predictions. I am sure this is what many sport fans go through when it comes to local bedlams, Super Bowl parties, NBA finals, and Stanley Cup play-offs. What comes to mind is how focused we, the avid sport enthusiast, get with anything that resembles a round ball, upright posts, glass backboards, and a black puck.
For content marketing it is the bread and butter of the blog: keywords. If you don’t get this right you could find yourself behind in your campaign or totally off-base with your readership results.
Keywords are more essential in some cases than even SEO methods to your site. There are 3 major factors to pay particular attention to when creating your content:
1. Relevance
First, before you start your campaign, try going through a keyword brainstorming exercise. Come up with at least 20 terms or keywords that are relevant to your industry. For example, if I sell cast irons skillets for a major brand I would want to start putting together terms that people would put into their search browser to find my product.
Think of it as a predictive tool that will put your content in places that prospects will find your article. Try to come up with as many variations as possible but don’t over do it. We only want to start a simple push in the right direction.
2. Estimated Search Volume
Something to understand about keywords is the analytics associated for each word. Each term you search for in Google has a value to it that represents the amount of interest people are looking for in that word. To pick a good keyword to rank for look for it to have a “high seach volume” value assigned to it. For instance, if you pick “cooking with cast iron skillets” that may sound great on paper but if it brings a low search volume you might not get the traffic you want out of your term. So how does one know?
Sign up for Google Alerts. It’s like having a personal assistant keep track of your keyword terms. I use the Hubspot tool that is part of the inbound software platform. It automatically keeps track of the keywords I use with various rankings to make the picking easier. It’s a more tactical decision for which word or groups of words to use.
3. Difficulty
Believe it or not, keywords can have difficulty metrics you must measure for. Some keywords have a low difficulty level because they just are not that competitive for any other word. For instance, “cooking squid in a cast iron skillet” (a long-tail keyword) just doesn’t get searched for all that much so the volume is low.
Google is extremely competitive about how keywords appear on their search results and only 10 of the best get picked to be on the front page of the rankings. (How they determine this is based on their algorithm that recently changed, requiring a much more in depth discussion.) Depending on wether you are ranking your website page or a blog, you might be competing for to appear in the top 10 for different reasons. To rank in the top 10 is not necessarily a priority if you are new to ranking because Google also needs to know that you are an authority in your keyword. So if you are starting out as a new authority, one method that works is to rank for low volume difficulty at first and improve on that particular keyword and later you can compete with a higher volume level keyword. This way you have a ranking authority that will help you get placed in the top 10 page.
As you can see, it takes some work and patience to improve your blog. Figuring out how keyword research for blogs work is not a “plug and play” process. Do your work before you write your article or during your editing process. Sometimes I will write my article and find that I have to re-word or insert better ranking keywords to bring my article up on search findings. This method works very well and without a tool like the Hubpsot keyword tool, you might find that keyword research takes extra steps that could be a struggle to keep on top of.
