An essential part of getting your head around SEO is understanding the keyword research process.
This post will cover the basics of keyword research as well as provide you with the essential guidelines and resources that you’ll need to find the right keywords for your blog posts and use them efficiently.
All success at blogging is based on good keyword research skills and quality content.
Quality content is essential for ranking on search engines but without understanding the importance of keywords and keyword research, you are shooting in the dark and your content, good quality though it may be, risks getting completely lost and never attracting any traffic.
Understanding Keywords and Their Importance
A Keyword is a term you’ll hear all the time from bloggers and online content creators including YouTubers.
It is primarily found in the title of a piece of content such as a blog post and has two main functions that should always go hand in hand:
- To inform readers what the content is about
- To attract clicks/engagement to a piece of content
Keywords also need to be:
- SEO-friendly
- Targeted
- And optimised for maximum traffic
Here’s something to think about: what makes you click on a piece of content when you do a search?
It probably ranks high, catches your attention and seems relevant to what you are looking for, right?
In that case, the person who wrote that article did a great job; they did good keyword research! They also must have produced high quality content.
A keyword is not typically one word but usually several words. You also have short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords.
A short-tail is usually quite broad and harder to rank for while a long-tail keyword is lengther and often contains other keywords in it as a result of being longer.
For example, a short-tail keyword might be ‘best Mexican foods,’ while a long-tail keyword might be ‘top 10 Mexican resturants with sea food.’
The first of these targets/includes these keywords:
- Mexican food/foods
- Best Mexican food/foods
The long-tail keyword includes these keywords:
- Top Mexican resturants
- Top 10 Mexican resturants
- Mexican resturants with sea food
- Resturants with seafood
- Seafood resturants in Mexico
- Top 10 restruants that serve sea food in Mexico
- Etc.
It’s essential to use a carefully chosen keyword everytime you write something; people find you and are drawn to click on your content and search engines pick it up as well.
A fair bit of the ranking process is based on your focus keyword but it is just as important to avoid keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing means using your keyword too often in your content. You want to rarely use the exact keyword in your text.
The Keyword Research Process
There is a wide range of methods and keyword research tools available to bloggers. Different bloggers use different methods and tools.
Before we discuss keyword research tools, there is a method you can use for your keyword research that doesn’t require the use of a research tool and that is simply to go to Google and use the automatic suggestions that come up when you put your keyword idea into the search bar.
For the following example, let’s say your niche is Japanese cooking and your general keyword is ‘Japanese recepies.’
What we’re going to do is find a keyword that is less broad than ‘Japanese recepie.’
As shown below, once the keyword is typed into the searchbar, Google will suggest several versions of the keyword. These are all keyword ideas – possible titles for your blog post.
If Google itself is suggesting these keywords, it means that people are searching for them which is good news because if people are putting these search terms into Google, we know that articles with these search terms are getting organic traffic.
Out of the suggested keywords, there are two that would probably good to target: ‘Japanese recipes with chicken’ and ‘Japanese recipes with ground beef.’
Remember, a keyword does need to make gramatical sense. It’s important not to have a keyword like this: ‘Japanese recepis easy.’ But you could have one called ‘easy Japanese recepie ideas.’
Then after your keyword, you should add something to make it more engaging. Short titles aren’t usually a good idea.
So, you could have this as a keyword, ‘easy Japanese recepies: beginner-friendly and delicious!’
But that ‘easy Japanese recepies’ still seems quite competive so you’d need to write a really good article.
A good idea also is check the top results of Google for the keywords you want to rank for. Observe what your competetors are doing to get those high rankings and see if you can produce something as good but preferably even better than what they have. Do this without copying them however – originality is absolutely key in blogging and SEO best practices.
The Alphabet Soup Technique
Another great trick is the alphabet soup technique where you put your keyword into the search bar again but after it you put an “a” and Google will give you suggestions that include something beginning with “a” after your keyword.
Then you can try it with the other letters of the alphabet to get many more keyword ideas.
If a keyword is not suggested by Google, it generally isn’t a good idea to target it because if it isn’t suggested, you won’t get any traffic as no one is looking for that search term.
Using the Underscore “( _ )”
You can also make use of the underscore, “( _ ),” by placing it before your keyword and you will get more keyword suggestions:
Other Google Search Tricks
Google also has a ‘People also ask’ section which offers similar and related results besides your original search term.
It is sometimes called ‘Related questions’ and again, it is telling you that people are asking those questions which means you could find more keywords based on those questions.