Where Do I Start With Keyword Research For My Blog?

If you own a website for your business, chances are good you’ve heard or been told that to help your reach, you should start a blog. Blogs are excellent tools to help you reach people who otherwise may not have found your site, but you must put the proper thought and planning into your blog posts.

Blogs can set you apart as an expert in your field, helping to gain more attention and customers. But to ensure your blog is found and your posts are read, you need to have thorough keyword research in place to better your search engine rankings and reach more people. But how do you begin your keyword research?

Why you should do keyword research for your blog posts?

Using the right keywords can help boost your organic reach, allowing you to reach potential customers who are interested in the goods or services you have to offer. To do that, you need to find the right keywords that adequately represent your business and can help your site receive high-quality traffic from search engines.

Keyword research will help you find and then analyze the actual search terms that users type into a search engine. This enables you to get a feel for what people who might utilize your business are searching for, allowing you to cater content to their needs.

Today’s keyword research needs to be even more sophisticated than ever before because search engines now factor in the user’s intent – what is the searcher actually intending to find with their search, not just the literal meaning behind the words. Research methods such as LSI analysis, TF-IDF analysis, or KGR analysis are a few methods used by internet marketers or automated keyword research tools to help find the right keywords to target with your content development and on-page optimization. These right keywords should best suit the need of search engines as well as internet users.

Keyword research shows you what people are searching for, and the popularity of those search terms, giving you a place from which to craft your content and reach those who genuinely want and need your services. You can research keywords by not only a metric of popularity such as search volume or a metric of difficulty such as a competition but also by search intent. Search intent factors in the semantic relationship between the words used in the web pages that already rank high for a particular keyword, allowing you to find different related keywords used in top-ranking sites.

So, how should you start your keyword research?

1. Make a list of seed keywords that are both important and relevant to your business. Think of topics that are important to your line of work. What are the most generic words through which you can describe your products or services? Think about not only the topics that you think are relevant but also ones that you may hear customers discussing. You can meet with your employees that are regularly in contact with new or existing clients to see what terminology they use to describe different services of yours. These include those who may answer the phone calls or who may reply to the clients’ emails or chat inquiries.
2. You can also use Google to find related keywords. When you type a keyword into Google, it will start to guess your search query and autosuggest other related keywords. Also, after you type in your keyword and hit enter, Google shows a few other related search terms under a section called people also searched for on the bottom of the search results page. This may help you think of new keywords that may work for your business.
3. Once you’ve identified these seed keywords, use a keyword research tool or keyword suggestion tool to generate related keywords for each seed keyword automatically. Allintitle.co has its own free keyword research tool that lets you discover hundreds of relevant keywords for a seed keyword you provide. These keywords are gathered from many sources and through various keywords research methods.
4. To further improve your list of related keywords, you can check out which keywords your website is already being shown to users for on search engines like Google, as well as the keywords that are currently being used to drive people to your site. This can be done by logging into your Google Search Console account and looking at the queries you’ve got impressions or clicks for. If you have an active Google Ads campaign, the search terms report is another ideal place to find out what exact search terms users have searched to find you.
5. Create a pool of keywords for each seed keyword you have found using some or all of the above methods, making sure you use a mix of both short-tail and longtail keywords. You might think this is not in line with the KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio) technique of targeting only low-competition and under-utilized longtail keywords. Remember that targeting the short-tail keywords is also essential to guide search engines on what topics your website is about while KGR keywords will help you gain high ranking for the high-intent longtail keywords that you will target with each blog post that you add to your site. That means having a healthy mix of both shorter, more generic terms (short-tail terms) and longer phrases (longtail keywords) can help you build up a stronger strategy to help you rank better.
6. Don’t forget to check in on your competitors too. Some keywords may be used by a competitor that you didn’t know about, knowing what your competition is doing is always very helpful. A keyword research tool like that of Allintitle.co can help you find what keywords are mostly used on top 10 websites on Google search results (these are basically your competitors), these keywords are called LSI keywords. You can also use our Keyword Gap Research tool to discover what keywords a particular competitor of you is ranking for. Likewise, if you have keywords on your list that your competition isn’t ranking for, that doesn’t mean you should ignore them. In fact, it may mean just the opposite, and it may provide the KGR keywords (low-hanging fruit) that can give you a competitive advantage over other sites.

How to write SEO-optimized blog posts after your keyword research?

Using these steps, you now have a well-researched keywords pool that will help you craft your blogs to drive more customers to your site. The most important thing, when actually writing your blog, would be that your post should address the User Search Intent in the best possible way. Other than this, there are some traditional, mostly on-page, SEO techniques you can use which includes:

• Write informative, unique content that actually address the search intent of the user. Use your target keywords in important areas, such as in the title tag, in the heading tags, and the first and last paragraphs of the text and throughout the content where it naturally fits.
• Don’t use the exact keywords over and over; instead, try to use different variations or closely related keywords. Don’t overuse keywords or don’t use keywords where it doesn’t naturally fit.
• Divide your content to different sections using subheadings, utilize bullet lists and numbers to organize ideas or items where there is a list.
• Use images or videos and other visual elements to improve your content’s readability.
• Add a table of content to the top of the blog post to help with the users’ navigation and help them quickly find what they need (don’t add this to all blogs and pages as it can be seen as over-optimization by Google’s machine learning system.)
• Work on the internal links, internal linking is one of the quickest SEO wins. So build meaningful, natural links between your articles.
• Your content shouldn’t be too-short or too-long, try to confine each blog writing to between 500 to 1500 words.

Remember not to over-optimize which can backfire if you do so.