Keyword research is something every blogger should delve into.
As a starting blogger, you naturally want visitors to your blog as quickly as possible. In the beginning, however, it is often disappointing when you look at your visitor numbers.
However, even as a novice blogger it is certainly possible to quickly get more visitors to your blog via Google .
This all has to do with the way you do keyword research and how good you are at it.
In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the importance of good keywords and how best to find them. So be sure to read on.
WHY IS KEYWORD RESEARCH IMPORTANT?
As a blogger, you naturally want visitors to your website as quickly as possible . Still, in most cases, as a beginner, it seems like you’re just writing for yourself, your friends, and family.
To ensure that you get the right visitors to your blog as quickly as possible, keyword research is extremely important.
With keyword research you look for keywords that your target audience is searching for.
For example, if you make a website about dogs, you obviously want to get people to your blog who are interested in dogs. You do this by looking for terms they are looking for to find information.
HOW DO YOU BEST HANDLE THIS?
Searching for keywords can be done in many different ways.
One of the easiest ways to find search terms is with the Google Auto suggest .
To use the Google Auto Suggest, go to Google and type your subject in the search bar, for example dogs.
If you then press the space bar, you immediately get a lot of related search terms.
Then you can add all the letters of the alphabet to get even more relevant search terms.
Although you can find a lot of search terms with this, this method is not popular. That’s because with auto suggest you can’t see how often a particular search term is searched.
To be able to see the search volumes of certain search terms or keywords , you can use a keyword tool .
There are many different tools, but basically they all do the same thing. They give you an estimate of how many people search for a particular search term each month.
If you’re just starting out as a blogger, you don’t have to choose a particular tool right away. You can also see what the monthly volume is at the Google Keyword planner.
It is important to know that with a paid keyword tool you have many more options and that in most cases it is definitely worth purchasing.
WHICH KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS CAN YOU USE FOR IT (FREE OR PAID)
You now know that if you want to get visitors to your website, you have to use the right keywords and search terms to be found in the search engines.
There are a number of tools available that you could use to find the right keywords. You can choose from free or paid tools.
SEMRUSH
Many professional blogger use a paid tool called SEMrush . This is a tool that allows you to analyze the visibility of your blog in the search engines.
Based on those analyses, you can then take steps to make your blog appear higher in Google .
SEMrush is a keyword tool that gives you detailed information about certain keywords and search terms. So you can see exactly the following:
- How often a certain search term is searched
- Whether the search term is popular or not
- What the competition is on the search term
- You can also research how many backlinks your site already has
AHREFS
Another paid keyword tool is Ahrefs . It’s a tool to help you get more traffic from Google, research your competitors and monitor your niche.
This tool is very similar to SEMrush but has a number of unique features such as:
- Comparing domain names (comparing yourself with competitors)
- Follow competitors’ websites to see what they’re writing about
- SEO analysis for your website and how you can improve it
If you are looking for keywords, it is definitely recommended to use a paid tool because it gives you much better insights.
But if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on keyword research tools right away, you can also get started with a free keyword tool.
GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER FOR KEYWORD RESEARCH
The Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword tool designed primarily for people who want to advertise with Google.
Here they can then research keywords and see how much it costs to advertise for a particular keyword.
In addition, with the Google Keyword Planner they can also see what the competition is for certain keywords if they want to advertise for them.
Many beginners think that competition analysis also works for a blog, but this is not the case. The competition you see with the Google Keyword Planner is only for if you want to advertise.
As a blogger, that is of no use to you. However, the competition from the Google Keyword Planner can give you an indication of the competition.
USING GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER FOR YOUR WEBSITE
Despite the fact that the Google Keyword Planner is made for advertising, many bloggers also use the tool themselves to find keywords.
All you need is a Google Adwords account that you can create for free.
After your registration you can log in with your gmail login details and then go to the Google Keyword planner.
Here you can type in the subject of your website and you will receive hundreds of keywords that are relevant to your subject.
You could practically write a blog for all these keywords, but it is important as a beginner to go for the longer search terms. We will come back to this later in the article.
KEYWORDTOOL.IO
Another free opportunity to find keywords is by using the website Keywordtool.io . This keyword tool has a free version and a paid version.
With the free version, you can only find relevant search terms, but you don’t have access to the monthly search volume and possible competition. You must have a paid account for this.
But if you are simply looking for keywords you want to write a blog about, keywordtool.io is also a very good way.
KEYWORD RESEARCH VIA GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
In addition to using keyword tools, you can find a lot of valuable information at Google Search Console .
If you have registered your website with Google Search Console, it often takes a while before data is displayed.
As soon as you get visitors to your website, you can conduct a keyword research via Google Search Console. You do this by going to Achievements. Below the graph that you see is a window with searches in it.
These are all searches on which your website ranks in the search engines. The great thing about this is that there may also be search terms that you have not yet written about.
It is therefore certainly a good idea to occasionally check Google Search Console to see if keywords appear that you can write a blog about.
HOW DO YOU FIND OUT THE SEARCH VOLUME OF KEYWORDS?
When searching for keywords, it is of course also important that those keywords are searched for.
It makes little sense to write a blog based on a search term that hardly anyone is looking for.
That is why it is important before you write a text about a keyword, you first look at the monthly search volume.
If you want to do that in a free way, you can enter the search term in the Google Keyword Planner. But if you choose to use a paid tool like Semrush, you can also measure the search volume of a keyword there.
Important: data from external keyword tools is not completely accurate in 90% of the cases.
This means that you may see a search volume of 10 searches per month, but in reality 1000 people are searching per month.
That is why it is also a good idea not to focus on the search volume indicated in your keyword tool.
In addition, Google is working on a major change in the way of searching and displaying search results (the BERT update is an example of this).
Where previously keywords were extremely important, Google is increasingly focusing on the term “Semantic Search”. This is also known as searching based on questions and topics.
Since the advent of voice search, more and more questions are being asked via Google instead of search terms.
While search terms and keywords are still important, it’s also important to include the new way of searching in your keyword research.
The advantage of blogging based on questions and topics is that you can then focus more quickly on writing long tail search terms.
WHAT ARE LONG TAIL KEYWORDS?
Long tail keywords are search terms that often consist of more than 3 terms .
If your website is about dogs, a primary search term could be “dog training”. Because it is quite difficult for a novice blogger to score on these terms, as a beginner it is better to focus on long tail keywords or terms.
These terms often have much less competition, which makes it easier for you to rank for these search terms in Google. This also directly means that you will get visitors to your website faster .
An example of a long tail keyword on the topic of dogs could be “raising a Labrador puppy by yourself”, or in the case of semantic search “How do I raise a puppy without training?”.
Because these search terms are very specific, you are already much less bothered by competition. In addition, larger websites focus more often on primary keywords. The chance that you will win against a large website with a lot of authority is small.
THE BEST STRATEGY FOR A STARTING WEBSITE
In the beginning , it is best to focus on less popular search terms. This significantly reduces the competition. This gives you a better chance of ranking well in the search engines.
In general, it works well to first go for keywords with 3 or 4 terms in the search term (long tail keywords).
If you already get quite a few visitors and you notice that your website is climbing further and further in the search results (also visible via Google Search Console), you can now and then take a gamble to use a popular search term for your text.
You can then do this more often if it turns out that your texts score well. If your text ends up somewhere on page 25 of the search results, it’s a better idea to continue with less popular search terms.
ADJUST THE WORD COUNT TO THE COMPETITION
A good method for better rankings is to adjust your text length to your competitors. This strategy is often used in America.
See how the text of your biggest competitors is written and then create a good blog that beats your competition.
In the beginning it is difficult to beat the big websites. Nevertheless, you increase the chance of success by applying this technique.
To determine the competition of a search term, you can view the number of search results in Google.
If there are less than 1 million search results, you have a very good chance of a good position. The quality of your text must be good for this.
Always try to write as many words as necessary, but don’t write to write. The more relevant your content is to the search term, the more likely you are to rank well in the search engines.
