How To Do Keyword Research for Blog Posts — A Guide for Affiliates

One thing has remained steady for inbound marketers seeking to optimize their websites-keyword research. This post will focus on Keyword Research for Blog Posts. We discuss why it’s essential, the keyword elements, how to perform your own keyword research for your SEO plan, which keywords you should use and what resources can help you find those keywords.

1. What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process responsible for finding the best keywords to target on your website or blog post. These are the “search terms”, which are typed into Google (or another search engine) when you’re looking to find something. Keywords can range from single words, like “plumber” or “yoga mats”, to complex phrases, like “best online yoga mats” or “yoga mat comparison”.

2. Why is keyword research essential?

Finding the right keywords to target on your website or blog means that you’ll be ranking for terms people are actively searching. Ranking on phrases with high search volume means you’ll get more clicks, which may mean more conversions (i.e., purchases, email signups, etc.).

Choosing keywords for their intent, search volume, and competition is an important part of writing blog posts, but it will only get you so far. For example, you may try to rank for “best yoga mats”. While the keyword gets a whopping 21.8K searches a month, the competition is indicated as HIGH.

Further to this, a quick look at the competition for the top 10 positions will show you how extremely difficult it will be to rank for “best yoga mats”. See extract below of the domain authority of the top ranking sites; any site that has a DA over 20 is fairly difficult to outrank.

Therefore, search volume and intent i.e. informational or transactional, are not the only indicators you need to consider.

Pro Tip

This service on Fiverr.com really helped me with finding keywords for my blog posts that were easy to rank for and had great search volume. I highly recommend this service, and the guy is very professional and super quick.

Check him out — https://fvrr.co/3fYk17C

3.Keyword Research Elements

Once you’ve determined that a keyword is relevant to your website and you want to target it in your content, it’s time to start ranking for it.

There are two primary elements of keyword research: search volume and competition. Search volume refers to how many times people search for a term in a month (higher is better). Competition refers to how many other websites are competing for the same keywords (lower is better). The higher the search volume and lower the competition for a given keyword, the better. Ideally, you want both to be high.

In addition to these 2 elements, another important ranking factor are the amount of backlinks that point to either your blog post, or to the post of your competition. Generally, the more backlinks a web page has, the more difficult it will be to outrank it. Staying with our “best yoga mats” example, you can see below the amount of backlinks each of the top 10 ranking websites have to the specific web page ranking for “best yoga mats”.

4.How to perform your own keyword research for your SEO plan?

It’s easy to find the right keywords if you understand some basic concepts about how search engines work. Here are a few tips:

• “Know what you know”

There is a lot of data on your website, and you need to identify what information is available that can help determine what customers are trying to find. For example, if you sell yoga mats, you know the materials they’re made out of and/or the size they are. Figure out how to use this information in your SEO plan.

• “Know what you don’t know”

You’ve got a little more wiggle room with this concept. You can come up with some keywords in your SEO plan, but you need to keep in mind what you know about the types of people searching for them. If you’re not 100% sure what people want when they type “yoga mat” into Google, then choose a different phrase that has at least one or two terms in it that you understand.

• “Look for low-hanging fruit”

Even if you only have a few relevant pieces of information on your website, there’s a way to find keywords that may prove fruitful in the future. For example, let’s say you only know the type of material used in your yoga mats because it’s mentioned in one paragraph of text on your “Products” page.

Find a related term (like the name of the material) and search it in Google along with other terms you think might be relevant like “best yoga mats” or “yoga mat reviews”. You’ll find terms that you wouldn’t have thought to google before, but still fall within your areas of expertise.

• “Combine ideas”

You can use this same method to find more keywords just by combining ideas you’ve already had. Remember how we got the word “plumber” from the conjunction of “plumbing” and “repair”?

Do something similar with your website information, like stitching two terms together or adding a number to one of the terms e.g. “10 best soft yoga mats”

4.Which keywords should you use on your website?

It’s always a good idea to make sure that at least one of the keywords you choose for your SEO plan is in your domain name, company name, and/or blog post titles. That way, search engine crawlers will know exactly what your website specializes in — although this relates more to SEO, which we will unpack in another post.

5. **Useful Resources**

Conducting proper keyword research for blog posts is essential to any successful SEO plan, but it can be time-consuming if you don’t know where to look for the right information. Here are some tools to speed up this process:

Pro Tip

This service on Fiverr.com really helped me with finding keywords for my blog posts that were easy to rank for and had great search volume. I highly recommend this service, and the guy is very professional and super quick.

Check him out — https://fvrr.co/3fYk17C

• The Google AdWords Keyword Tool tells you what people are searching for on Google, related search terms, and the approximate monthly search volume.
• The Google Trends Website allows you to see what’s trending by searching a keyword or phrase. If you want to know how something is trending over time, type in your term(s) into the “overtime” tab under “Explore Topics”.
• Wordtracker offers a free trial and has a massive database of keywords and phrases related to just about any industry.

Conclusion:

Keyword research and analysis is a prerequisite for the most effective SEO plan. If you know what customers are trying to find, then you can give them exactly what they’re looking for.

All that’s left is to write about it on your website!