How to Conduct A Productive Keyword Research for a Successful Blog

Conduct A Keyword Research

Blogging is an easiest way to earn passive income and web exposure. However, to be a successful blogger, there are many things you need to take into consideration. Other than content marketing, keyword research plays a significant role in determining the success of your blogging career. Not all bloggers know how to conduct a good keyword research, and this may affect their work when it comes to reach their target audience. In this article, I will tell you how to conduct a keyword research, so you can succeed as a blogger and reach your target audience.

So what is a keyword?

When it comes to blogging, a keyword can be referred as the search terms. These terms are words or phrases that people will use to find information online. It’s important to point out that, without proper keywords in your blog posts, the chances of being found in the web are slim, let alone ranking higher in google.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is whereby content creators research about the actual terms that people use when browsing the internet while looking for a piece of content. They inform the content creation strategy as well as marketing strategies.

Why is keyword research important?

The significance of having an appropriate keyword can never be overstated. Along with link building and content marketing, keyword research can determine whether your blogging work will reward you or not. It will determine the kind of traffic that visits your site, the profitability of your blog as well as whether you will rank or not in search engines.

And let’s be honest; why would someone start a blog if it cannot earn him some money? Or at least reach the target audience. It will be a waste of time and resources if you do everything else right and forget to do one fundamental and most basic requirement for SEO: Keyword research.

How to determine whether your keywords are effective or not

Having tons of keywords in your posts is not what you need to be ranked. What you need are quality and appropriate keywords. But how do you know if the search terms you are using in your posts are quality and appropriate? The following three questions will answer this as they are essential when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of keywords.

• Are the keywords targeting what your targeted audience is searching?
• Are the keywords helping your targeted audience finding answers to their problems/questions?
• Are the keywords bringing the relevant traffic that can help you meet your marketing and/or revenue goals?

If the answers to the above questions are affirmative, then stick to your strategy. But if you think your keywords are not achieving good results for you, then it is time you look other ways of conducting keyword research.

How to do proper keyword research

#1: Make a list of relevant topics related to your niche

Before you start the keyword research, it is important to first come up with topics for which you intend to rank for. Most SEO gurus such as Neil Patel will recommend that you get between 5-10 topic buckets that are most relevant to your field.

The topics you choose will depend on your level of blogging. If you blog regularly, the topics can be related to what you blog the most. Or even those topics that bring more conversions in terms of sales, email signups and more.

#2: Fill the topics with keywords

Having general topics and writing about them will not get you the kind of ranking you may want, let alone any quality traffic. After coming up with topics that you want to blog about, fill them with appropriate and relevant keywords. The keywords must be those you what to rank in the SERP and that your target audience is using to find information on Search engines.

Please note, at this step, you aren’t looking for a final list of key phrases to use in your article as the search terms. All you will be doing here is to come up with all possible terms that researchers might use when looking for answers to their questions. There are many term research tools that can help you with this matter.

#3: Research related search terms

You will be able to find many other key terms that online researchers use when looking for the content within a niche.

As a blogger, even after conducting keyword research, you find that you still need more. Google can help you find most related keywords in your bucket of topics. After plugging in your search terms, look at the list of related terms at the bottom and you will see a list of suggestions that can also be relevant to your research. We will not suggest you take them wholesome, you can just use them to generate some ideas about other more relevant search terms and phrases.

#4: Decide whether head terms or long-tail keywords

Brian Dean suggests having both head terms as well as long-tail phrases in your article while blogging.

Head terms are important as they are generic, and thus searched more often. It will help your article to be placed in its right category by the google bots when they crawl. However, these terms are searched more frequently but, ranking for them can be a little challenging as they are very competitive.

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are more specific to what you want the researchers to find. They contain three or more words, giving an online researcher a chance to be specific to what you want to find. Therefore these phrases are more preferred than the head terms by some SEO experts.

#5: Do competitor research

One problem that most bloggers don’t seem to understand is the fact that what works for your competitor might not necessarily work for you. Just because our competitor is using certain phrases to improve his traffic and rank doesn’t mean that you need the same key terms.

However, it is important to understand what keywords your competitor is ranking for. This will give you an idea of how to coil your keywords to rank and get conversions for your blog. Google AdWords keyword planner, HubSpot keywords app, and many others will show you the competition of every keyword that you intend to use. Make good use of them.

In conclusion, blogging can be very lucrative with the keyword strategy we explained. Although article writing is essential to promote your blogs, it is important to understand and have other skills related to blogging.

We would love to know about your experience and the strategy you are following for the success of your blog. Did you implement what we have mentioned above? What changes did you noticed?