Keywords, keywords, keywords! Everyone in the blogging & niche website community is always talking about keywords, keyword research, keyword optimization & keyword analysis! Why?
Everyone wants their blog posts to be successful and read by as many people as possible. The only way to do that – as simple as it sounds, is to write articles and blog posts that people actually want to read!
One way to assess what people want to read is to determine what types of articles and blog posts people are presently searching for. The SPECIFIC WORDS people are collectively using to search on Google, Bing or Duckduckgo for those topics they are interested in are the KEYWORDS we are interested in identifying an assessing the existing competition.
Here I go through, step-by-step, the process of keyword research & analysis to identify topics that people are currently searching for and the expected difficulty to rank highly with the popular search engines for those topics & the keywords people are using to locate article on those topics.
Keyword research & analysis is really about learning as much as you can about the level of interest regarding the topic you are considering writing about, the keywords people are using to search up information regarding those topics & assessing the existing competition that is already out there for those topics based on keyword competition. Think of it as market research for your new potential post. Is it worth writing, and if it is, how likely are you to win eyeballs?
My focus here is a step-by-step process for doing keyword research & analysis – using free keyword tools that are out there on the Internet, or free versions of tools that also have paid versions.
Step-by-Step Keyword Research & Analysis
- Generate Keyword Ideas Before you start writing a blog post or article for your website – you need to generate a lot of ideas to sort through and analyze. Again – the goal here is to right a post or article that you already know people are searching for! There are several free tools to accomplish this with – and I would definitely suggest you start with the free options first – as opposed to the tools that cost something. There may be some overlap between these steps – because of the feature sets of some of the specific tools.
- Search Engines Auto-Suggest: Alphabet soup method with “Auto Suggest” with Google & other search engines (FREE). Type in your topic and then go right through the alphabet to see what comes up when you type that letter after your topic! For example: “3D printing” (and see what comes up), then “3D printing” (space) “a” (and see what comes up), then “3D printing” (space) “b” (And see what comes up)…. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what AnswerThePublic is doing. It actually scrapes this information from Google and presents it visually and saves you from all the typing.
- Retail Sites Auto-Suggest Boxes (Search Bars): Alphabet soup method with Auto-Suggest again – but this time with websites like Amazon.com, & Etsy, as opposed to search engines. You will probably get at least some ideas that you would not by using the search engines alone!
- Keyword Sheeter – (FREE) Great way to generate a lot of keywords quickly! Both regular keywords & long-tail keywords. No volume of keywords or keyword difficulty – just the keywords. For both the volume and the keyword difficulty – you will need to use other tools.
- Wordstream…
- Generate Long-Tail Keyword Ideas
- AnswerThePublic: (FREE) I like this tool a lot because it is visual and gives you a lot of suggestions to consider. Kind of like a mind map! Gives you ides for long-tail keywords and blog post content / topic ideas.
- Determine Keyword Search Volume
- Google Keyword Planner – (FREE) To use Google Keyword Planner you have to setup a Google Ads account and start a campaign (that you should then immediately PAUSE). A bit of a pain, yes – but worth it. Google Keyword Planner is a great tool that can help you find keywords, determine search volume, determine keyword difficulty and find out the keywords your competition is using. You can use this tool to determine the keywords a website is using AND/OR an individual page or post on that website! However, remember that this tool is for PAID keyword competition – and NOT ORGANIC search competition. So – you might still want to assess the keyword difficulty with another research tool – such as the free SEO tools from Ahrefs (Ahrefs’ Free SEO Tools).
- Ubersuggest. I like this tool a lot! There is a lot of great information here, even for the free version – but you are only limited to 3 free searches per day. In addition to search volume you can also get information on keyword difficulty and social media sharing.
- Determine Keyword Competition/Difficulty
- Keywords Everywhere – (FREE) Assess keyword difficulty with this free tool. Keywords Everywhere is a plugin that you need to install in your browser to use. You can install it in Chrome & FireFox. Look at the MOZ DA (Domain Authority) score for the website you would be competing against. What you really want to find is keywords where the top results have domains that don’t have a particularly high MOZ DA score. Ideally you want to see the top 10 or so search results with MOZ DA scores below something like 25 or 30. That would indicate that you would have more likelihood of successfully competing against such websites for that keyword.
- Ahrefs’ Free SEO Tools (FREE) Keyword difficulty checker, keyword generator, keyword rank checker & many more! Very accurate – maybe more so than a lot of other free tools.
- Ubersuggest again…
- Evaluate Search Volume Trend for Desired Keywords
- Are search volumes increasing or decreasing? Google Trends – (FREE) Determine if search volume for a particular keyword is trending up or trending down. think about it – even if competition for the keyword you have found is LOW – does it really matter – if it is trending downward? Ideally, you want to find the trend for your keyword to be AT LEAST stable – or TRENDING UPWARDS!
- Identify High Ranking Competition Blog Posts for Desired Keywords. After identifying potential topics to write about and assessing the competition and expected difficulty in ranking well for those topics – its a good idea to see what other people have already written about on that topic. So go back and look at the top 10 results with various search engines for that topic and spend some time reading and evaluating those posts & articles. After doing so, ask yourself these questions:
- Are you confident that you can add something to those topics?
- Can you write and organize your post as well as, or better, than the current top results?
- Do you have an angle or perspective/original research that might be more helpful in explaining your topic than what is already out there?
- Analyze the posts of identified competitors using a tool like Spyfu.com.
If you follow these steps I’ve outlined above and produce well written & organized articles & blog posts based on carefully selected keywords & topics, I am confident that your posts will rank well with the search engines and be read by many people. And it only follows, that if you are attracting the eyeballs with your posts – monetizing that traffic will prove to be lucrative and financially rewarding for you!
Outline Blog article
Sincerely,
