Learn how to do keyword research
What is Keyword Research?
Before we get too far, let’s answer the question: What is keyword research? Quite simply it is the process of gathering data about the keywords that people type in to find your site. Basically, you are mapping out what people want and how you can give it to them.
Why Do Keyword Research?
Many people don’t take the time to gather information about what their customers want. Many people simply go to a site like Google’s keyword tool and start typing in ideas for content they may write, and get results for what people search for. This is clearly not the best way to do SEO keyword research services.
There are many reasons you should do proper research and design a plan for optimizing your site.
You’ll increase the quality of content on your website by presenting what your customers want, not just what you think they want.
You’ll have a much easier time ranking for your keywords because you know what to write about and what people are searching for. This means you’ll need fewer backlinks to rank for your keywords.
You’ll put yourself in a position to dominate the SERPs. When you know what people are searching for, you can rank higher and take a lot of the traffic.
What is a Good Keyword?
A good keyword is one that has decent search volume, but not too much competition.
Search volume should be large enough to give you enough traffic, but not so high that it becomes difficult to rank for the keyword.
Competition is how many people are already competing for ranking in the SERPs for the keyword.
A good keyword is not too easy to rank for nor is it impossible. It falls in the middle range where most people fail and give up.
How to Find Keywords for Your Site?
Now that you know the basics of what a good keyword is, it’s time to find some of them. There are several ways you can go about this and both can be used at the same time.
Here are some methods you can use to find keywords for your site:
Use Google’s Keyword Tool
My personal favorite is using Google’s keyword tool. This is the most popular method for finding keywords and it’s very easy to use, but it can be difficult to get good results. Simply enter in some keywords related to your site and Google will give you a list of search results with the most searched for terms.
Delete any keywords that have a large number of monthly searches, but too much competition.
Creating an SEO Keyword Plan
Now that you have a list of keywords it’s time to create a plan for optimizing your site. Depending on how many keywords you have, this can take a long time to do, but it’s extremely important.
Start by creating a list, and organizing the keywords based on priority and use.
Priority is how difficult to rank for each keyword is.
Use is how much traffic the keyword will send to your site.
The higher priority and more traffic a specific keyword is, the more time you’ll want to spend optimizing for it.
Ranking Your Site in The Search Engine Results Page (SERP’s)
Congratulations, you now have a website, and some keywords to go with it. Now all you need is to rank for those keywords on the search engine results page.
The best way to rank for keywords is through backlinks. A backlink is when someone else links to your website from their website, giving you some of their link juice.
This means that if someone with a high DA links to your site, they are essentially giving you their trustworthiness, which is very valuable.
The more quality backlinks your site has, the higher it will rank in the SERPs.
Understand the importance of keywords in your blog posts
Is it important to have keywords in your blog?
Keywords are an essential part of blogging. Keywords are the words that people use when they are searching for information on your blog. For example, if you are writing a blog about new cars, people will search using the keyword “new cars”. If you have not included these words as a keyword, your blog will not show up when people search for the information they need.
When you have an important or popular blog, you have a lot of competition for keywords. This means that there are thousands of other blogs out there that cover the same information as you do. In this situation, it is very important to include keywords in your blog to help you stand out from the competition. This is known as search engine optimization (SEO).
One way you can include keywords in your blog is to make sure that the first paragraph of each blog post includes the keyword. This is known as the “first paragraph trick” because it is almost always the first paragraph of your blog that people read. This gives you the perfect opportunity to include your keyword.
Another way to include keywords in your blog is to give each post a title that includes the keyword. The title should be distinctive and should make it clear to people what the blog post is about.
You can also include keywords in your blog by making your blog posts easy to read. This means using subheadings, bullet points, and bold text where appropriate. These are all ways that people use to search for information on the internet.
Finally, you can include keywords in your blog by linking to other blogs that cover similar topics. For example, if you have a blog about green living, you should include links to other blogs that are related. You can also link to websites or videos that people will find useful, such as government websites.
TIP: Keywords can be difficult to research and choose for your blog because they are so specific to your niche. We have this great tool you can use to research the most popular keywords in any niche!
Use a tool like Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin to help with keyword optimization
I just went to the Yoast SEO Plugin’s site and they have a pretty sweet guide on how to optimize your articles. Here is one of their examples:
Here’s how it actually shows up on the page:
Not bad, but even if I went through and optimized my Meta titles, descriptions, and tags it likely won’t affect my traffic that much.
But what if I made sure to use the keywords of “Yoast SEO Plugin” quite a bit in my articles, so that the Yoast SEO Plugin website would rank high for those keywords?
So if we do a search of the keywords “Yoast SEO Plugin”, here are the results:
Not bad. I’m up to page 2 of Google for this set of keywords, which is pretty good. But I can do better…
By looking at both my website’s traffic numbers and the Yoast SEO Plugin website’s traffic numbers, it seems that people are searching for “Yoast SEO Plugin” more frequently than they are searching for the keyword combinations “Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin” and ” WordPress SEO by Yoast”.
If we add in these keyword combinations to our articles, like below:
Not only do I rank on page 1 for these keywords, but I also get a lot more traffic from them as well.
So by optimizing our on-page SEO and using keywords that people search for more frequently than they search for our business name, we can get a nice boost in traffic.
And that’s how you get more traffic from search engines like Google.
