Hey, y’all welcome back to the PresentBlogging here. I am Vishal Rana and today’s article is going to be all about keywords.
We’ve been getting a ton of questions in the Facebook group about how to find good keywords and what type of keywords you should be writing about.
So, I wanted to take the time to make an article really outlining this process because it’s one of the most important things when it comes to creating a blog.
If you don’t know the right keywords to write about then it’s going to be a TOUGH time finding success with your blog.
I actually posted an article about 6 months ago that was like an SEO for beginners article that’s a much more in-depth article and much longer about everything around SEO.
This article is specifically just going to be about keywords and getting you guys in the RIGHT frame of mind when it comes to choosing keywords for your own blog.
Now I do want to say we talk about this concept a lot more in-depth in the SEO course over at PresentBlogging but I still wanted to create this article so that everyone had a FREE resource to check out and get an idea of the frame of mind that they should have when it comes to creating the content for their blog.
So, before we get too deep into it I want to make sure that you guys understand exactly what a keyword is.
What Is A Keyword?
A keyword is really just another name for a search query.
For example, if you wanted to find some soft socks you would probably hop over into Google and type soft socks into the search bar.
The word or the phrase soft socks is your keyword. It doesn’t just have to be one word it can be a full phrase or just a couple of words.
Understanding And Choosing The Right Keywords
Overall keywords are really just the ideas and topics that your content is actually about. So, with that being said let’s talk a little bit more about understanding keywords and how to choose the right ones for your blog.
When it comes to choosing keywords there are a couple of things that you’re going to want to think about before you actually choose exactly what you’re going to write about.
Know Your Niche FIRST
First, obviously, you want to know your niche before you start thinking about keywords.
If you don’t have a niche for your blog then it’s going to be all over the place. There are millions and trillions of possible keywords to write about so make sure that you have your niche fully figured out before you start trying to do keyword research.
Without it, you’re kind of doing an egg before the chicken type of situation.
If your niche is say something like yoga well then you know you’re going to want to write about things like yoga mats or yoga for beginners or yoga blocks and things like that.
So, just by knowing your niche, you’re actually going to know a general amount of keywords that you should be covering on your blog.
Now with that being said, there are 2 concepts that I think are really important to fully understand before you start delving into the world of building out, like a content calendar with a keyword list and things like that.
The first is going to be a pillar with the supporting articles method.
Some people call it a wheel and spoke method, some people call them uh primary articles supporting articles. There are tons of names for it.
But generally, the CONCEPT is that some really high-volume keywords are harder to rank for than some more specific and lower-volume keywords. So, we want to make sure that we’re writing a good MIX of both.
If you just write extremely hard to rank for high-volume keywords you may NEVER rank for those keywords. You may never start to pull in traffic to your website or if you do it’s going to take a really really long time.
By writing articles that are targeting more specific and lower volume keywords you have a much higher chance of ranking and bringing in that initial traffic for your blog.
Surprisingly, there’s a little TRICK where if you link from those smaller articles to the bigger articles you can actually start to drive traffic to those more difficult to rank for keywords without actually ranking for them.
By doing this with intention and purpose we can utilize those easier to rank for keywords to improve our chances and odds of ranking for those much larger keywords.
For example, a really hard keyword to rank for might be yoga for beginners.
So, in order to do this strategy properly, you would go ahead and write a post about yoga for beginners that’s going to be a really difficult keyword to rank for.
So, the ODDS are it’s going to be a really-really-really long time if ever that you start to rank for that keyword.
So, you’ll write a more specific post centered around something that is related to that topic like yoga mats for beginners.
So it’s still centered around yoga for beginners but it’s centered around a more specific thing that’s probably getting a lot less search volume than the general term.
By writing the article yoga mats for beginners you can actually LINK BACK to the yoga for beginners article and once you start to rank for yoga mats for beginners people can actually click that link and go read the yoga for beginners article.
Surprisingly, you’re really just driving traffic to a much more difficult to rank for a keyword and increasing the odds of ranking for that keyword because not only are you getting eyes and readers on that article you’re also SPREADING what we call link juice to that article.
Every time someone links to the yoga mats for beginners article you’re linking back to the yoga for beginners article and it’s spreading that authority over per see.
Now there are a lot of people that say you know that that isn’t true or that link juice doesn’t actually work that way but I have found that regardless of that this strategy works really well for getting traffic to a post that might be a lot harder to rank for.
Honestly, you’d be really surprised how much traffic you can bring to an article just by using this method.
Buyer Intent Keyword
The second thing that is just as important to remember is that all keywords are not created equal. let’s take for example the keyword yoga.
This keyword probably gets more than a million searches across the world but it might not be as valuable to your blog as say the keyword best yoga mat which I’m sure gets a lot less searches but has a lot more value.
The reason being is that the keyword best yoga mat is actually a buyer intent keyword and all that means is that when someone types in that keyword specifically best yoga mat they’re more than likely looking to actually purchase a yoga mat.
They just need someone who’s reviewed yoga mats to tell them what the best one is when it comes to buying things we all sort of want to see like the reviews and the opinions on something before we spend our hard-earned money on it.
Now when you COMPARE this to a keyword say like yoga someone might just actually be interested in the history of yoga or where yoga came from.
They’re not necessarily looking to actually spend money in that moment.
This is really important to keep in mind because your goal with your blog is it’s a business, its goal is to make money and so while say you ranked for yoga you might get a ton of traffic every single month.
You might not necessarily be making the same amount of money as if you were ranking number one for best yoga mats.
Traffic is one of those weird sorts of FUNNY things where it can really be boiled down to a vanity metric for a lot of people.
A lot of bloggers will say oh I get 100,000 visits a month or 50,000 visits a month but they’re not actually making that much money because they’re not ranking for keywords that make a lot of money.
It’s better to bring in 20,000 visits and make 5 grand a month than bring in 50,000 visits and make 2 grand a month.
The traffic doesn’t matter if it’s not actually a reflection of your income or not actually affecting the total amount of income that you make. So, just remember it’s not necessarily about how much traffic you get to your blog.
It’s more about the type of traffic you get to your blog.
You don’t want to get CAUGHT UP in the vanity metrics and forget the purpose of trying to get people to your blog in the first place which is to just make more money and to have satisfied readers.
I want you to remember these 2 things as you start to approach keywords and it’s something that you should really start to kind of internalize where it’s like a natural HABIT of every time you start to look for keywords or look at keywords you ask yourself…
- Does this keyword have value to my blog?
- Would it actually make me more money?
- Would it actually provide some sort of value to my readers that would move or propel my business forward?
Don’t just write about a keyword just because it should have a purpose of some sort.
Misconceptions About Keywords
Now that we’re in the right frame of mind when it comes to choosing keywords I actually want to clear up a couple of misconceptions about keywords that I hear all the time that I think this is important to sort of clear the air about.
The FIRST one being and I know we kind of already addressed this but I really want to drill it into you guys’ heads is that just because a keyword gets a lot of searches doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good keyword.
Many searches ≠ Money making keywords
When I say good I’m talking about a money-making keyword or a keyword that provides a lot of value to your audience.
SECONDLY is that you shouldn’t create a post around a keyword that is considered really hard to rank for.
Not writing hard to rank blog posts
This is a misconception I hear all the time and it’s really important that you kind of uh like push that out of your mind because the REALITY is,
- If you never write a post around that keyword say it’s you know a really big keyword with 150,000 searches a month.
- If you never write that article around that keyword then you will never rank for it. It’s impossible.
You haven’t written about it so you want to put yourself in the game.
Yes, you may never rank for that keyword and you may never be on the first page for it.
But, you’ll never know if you don’t write it.
If you start your blog and you write blog posts around really difficult keywords that are hard to rank for and you put in years and years and years of work on your blog then you may be surprised that eventually, you can start to rank for some of those keywords.
But, you’ll never know if you don’t actually write them and this is actually important for another reason as well like we TALKED about earlier with having a pillar article with supporting articles.
This means that a lot of people may come to your site and really enjoy your content and then start JUMPING around your website to read other things.
When they’re doing that if you have articles that say are really really difficult to rank for and you’re not bringing in any organic traffic form you can still get traffic to those pages just from people bouncing around.
The THIRD is that keywords have to get a ton of search volume in order to be worth writing.
I actually want to look for this article one day and kind of show it to you guys but I believe there was someone who was doing a sort of experiment with blogging where they wrote only about keywords that had less than 100 searches a month.
I think they did like 150 articles and the FUNNY thing is their blog actually ended up bringing in quite a bit of traffic and making a pretty decent income.
While you should focus on writing keywords that stand to bring in a good amount of traffic, don’t shy away from easy to rank for keywords just because they don’t get thousands and thousands of search volumes every month.
In the same vein, it’s also important to remember that you can write about a keyword just because you want to just because you think it would be COOL TO SHARE with your audience.
Let me give you guys an example say we continue with the yoga niche.
You may want to write a blog post that’s centered around your journey with yoga so it’s something like how I started yoga or how I got into yoga.
This might not necessarily be an insanely massive keyword because it’s much more personal and much more specific to you.
But, it can be really really valuable to your audience because they can relate to that post they can sort of get an idea of who you are and why you’re creating the content that you’re creating.
It helps them to form a connection with you so that the next time they’re interested in something about yoga they may just go STRAIGHT to your website rather than just looking for that thing on Google.
A keyword doesn’t just have to have a lot of searches or specifically be a buyer intent keyword to be worth writing about it can just be something that you want to do for fun or something to connect with your audience better.
Now I do want to say it should be in your niche.
You obviously don’t want to write about like your new sports car if you’re in the yoga niche but I want you guys to keep in mind that…
- Your business should be fun,
- Your business should be personal to you and,
- You should enjoy it.
There is nothing WRONG with writing blog posts that are more personal or that are focused on connecting with your audience.
A great example of this is a URL shortener script for Blogger article on PresentBlogging.
People love this article and especially newbie Bloggers.
It doesn’t get a ton of traffic or anything like that but every time one of our readers read that article we get them reaching out and saying how much it helped them and how much it made them feel better about the process of blogging.
How To Find Keywords For Your Blog
So now that we have some of the more common misconceptions out of the way I actually wanted to show you guys how you can go about finding your own keywords for your blog and to sort of give you guys an EXAMPLE of how to approach keyword research with the concepts that we talked about in this article.
Now I do want to say that I personally use ahrefs. I personally use ahrefs for keyword research and that’s just the tool that we use at PresentBlogging.
It’s definitely the tool I most recommend for people but it is a little bit pricey.
If you’re a beginner blogger or you’re on a budget then you might have to start looking at some more FREE options or some more budget options.
For this article specifically, I’m going to be showing you guys how to do a little bit of keyword research using Ubersuggest and the reason I’m going to be using Ubersuggest is that it actually has a daily allowance that you can use for free.
I’m in NO WAY suggesting that you guys should go pay for Ubersuggest. I’m just not sure if it’s worth it because it’s not a tool that I personally pay for or use.
This is just the best free option that I have found when it comes to just doing a quick little bit of keyword research.
So with that being said, I’m going to show you guys 2 different WAYS that you can actually use Ubersuggest to get some different keyword ideas for your own blog.
The first way is just going to be typing your niche into Ubersuggest so let’s use the example of yoga.
Once we type that in and hit search we can actually see an entire list of keywords that contain that keyword these are going to be great options for some larger more difficult keywords that would serve as pillar posts.
Keywords like yoga poses, yoga mats, and yoga pants are going to be really BIG keywords and these are going to be more fall into that pillar post area.
Not always but typically you can take any keywords that are centered around products in your niche and add the word best to it and you have a GREAT article that you can write comparing the different versions of those products.
It’s also going to serve to separate yourself from the more general versions of that keyword.
For example, yoga mats the keyword best yoga mats is going to be a better keyword than just yoga mats and I think it’s going to be a little MORE specific.
So in this case it would probably be better to write an article with the main keyword being best yoga mat rather than just yoga mat.
Now let me show you the SECOND WAY that you can use Ubersuggest for doing some more specific keyword research.
You can take a buyer intent keyword and actually type it into the Google search bar and then copy the URL of the first blog that you see that is ranking for that keyword.
Now keep in mind you don’t want to just use the FIRST competitor you see because we want to skip any major publications things like New York times or like tech review magazine.
There’s going to be a ton of publications that write about tons of different things not just specifically your niche.
So we want to keep going until we find a blog that’s specifically about yoga. For example, I see TheYogaNomads.
I’d click on their post and then actually take the competitor URL homepage and copy it and put it into Ubersuggest.
This is doing what we call competitor research.
You’re now able to look at the top pages by traffic and you can get some ideas for more content that you can write about.
So, it allows you to see what they’re getting the most traffic from so that if you also want to get some of that traffic you can write about the same thing.
Now there are tons of more ways you can use Ubersuggest to find keywords but keep in mind that the free version is very LIMITED.
I’m not saying by any means you should pay for Ubersuggest unless you want to I just want you to keep that in mind.
Some other tools out there that you can use for keyword research are Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, SurferSEO, and endless others.
I’m actually going to put a link to one of our articles that actually tells you some of the different SEO tools that you can use as far as doing keyword research so that if you guys want to check out some of those other tools you can.
Conclusion
Alright guys, I really hope that this sort of clarifies how you should be approaching keywords for your own blog and really helps to shape you guys frame of mind when it comes to picking what keywords you should be writing about for your blog.
I think a lot of people sort of start to try and attack keyword research really quickly without ever sort of getting in that frame of mind or really sort of understanding hey what type of keywords should I be writing about.
Every SEO guru and expert out there has their own approach for keyword research so if you guys don’t like this one that is totally fine.
There are endless other ways or endless other strategies that you can use but I just wanted to give you guys this QUICK reader’s digest lesson or version of how I do my keyword research so that you guys can approach yours with that same strategy.
I really hope this article helped you guys and for everyone out there that’s been asking a lot about keyword research, I hope this sort of answers a lot of those questions that you guys have been asking.
Let me know in the comments if you all have any other questions about keyword research and maybe down the road I can create an additional article that’s sort of centered around this topic because it’s so important for your blog.
But with all that said I really appreciate you guys sticking around to the end of the article and I am looking forward to seeing y’all in the next one you
Source :https://presentblogging.com