“Keyword Research” is one of the most important and interesting topics of blogging.
What is Keyword?
Key + Word = Keyword = “All important words that define your article are known as Keyword”
Why we need it?
Human need it because – ‘Keyword’ is important for easy selection and categorization.
e.g. – When you go to a mall for shopping then keywords like – ‘Men Clothes’ or ‘Women Clothes’ help you to target a particular section of your choice.
Search Engine needs it because – ‘Keyword’ helps it to index article for proper search terms/queries
Search Engine bot is a program, it want some input from article so that it can categorize the article appropriately and index it for most suitable search terms.
Keyword Importance in terms of Online Business
What is more important for a successful online business (including blog)?
It is traffic – No matter how good your site/blog is; if there is no traffic on it then you cannot earn a single penny from it.
Most targeted traffic (we can say them potential customer as well) comes through search engines. You can get traffic from search engines when you are on top ranking in search engine for high volume search queries.
So you need ‘keyword’ or ‘keyword phrase’ to get a better ranking in SERP to get more and more targeted traffic to your website/blog.
What is Keyword Research?
You cannot be on first page of search engine result page for any keyword or ‘keyword Phrase’ as every second person trying to come on first page for high traffic search terms.
There is lots of competition for high volume search terms.
So you need to target on those keyword or ‘Keyword Phrase’ that fulfill below requirement
1- Must match your website content/service/product.
2- Must have low or medium competition so that you can get a better ranking in SERP.
3- Must provide you a decent number of targeted traffic regularly.
My Keyword Research Process
Tool I use – I use following tools for my keyword research
Currently I am not using any paid tool for keyword research.
Usually there are two ways to do keyword research
1- First think about a topic and then do ‘Keyword Research’ around that topic and then use this keyword while writing your article.
2- First do a ‘Keyword Research’ and then think a topic for article around those keywords.
I usually prefer first one.
Step 1 – Select a topic to write
First you need to select a topic to write so that we can move forward to do some keyword analysis around that term.
Step 2 – Create your own keyword list around your topic
Once you decided your topic now think like an end user and try to list down some keyword or ‘keyword phrase’ that you can think to search some information about that topic.
E.g.
If I am writing about ‘Keyword Research’ then below terms came into my mind for search in Google
Note down all these terms.
Step 3 – Collect ‘Keyword’ or ‘Keyword Phrase’ from Google Search
Open Google Search and put your ‘Keyword’ or ‘Keyword Phrase’ from the list you created in step 2. Google provide you some result around your searched term and on the bottom of the result page you will find a section – “Search Keyword related to”
It provides you most searched terms that belong to the search term enter by you. Add these ‘keyword phrase’ in to your list that you created in step 2.
e.g. I searched for “how to find top keywords” and I got following terms as a suggestion.
Step 4 – Collect Keyword from your competitor’s page
Do you know who your competitors are? Let me tell you
Open Google and put the search terms that you created in step 2 & 3. Google provide you search result. Domain that is appearing on result page are your competitor for that search term because you want to beat the existing websites to make your place in SERP.
Now open each result page (I would suggest – focus on first 25 – 30 results provided by search engine) and check what keywords they are using and note down in your list.
Till now you have a long list of keyword phrase that has following properties
By now you have a long list of ‘keyword phrases’ and you cannot include all these ‘keyword phrases’ in your single article.
Step 5 – Analysis of keyword phrase
Now it’s time to do some analysis on the ‘Keyword Phrases’ we collected in step 2, 3 & 4 so that we can remove low quality keyword phrase.
Open ‘Google Adword Keyword Tool’ and put your first ‘Keyword Phrases’ from the list into keyword section.
Select your targeted geo location (country).
On the left hand side you will find three options (Phrase, Exact and broad). Select ‘Exact’ option as it provides you competition data and monthly search volume for exactly the keyword phrase you entered.
Note down its competition level and monthly search volume.
Repeat this process for all the search terms you created till now. Google Adword Keyword tool also provide some additional suggestion (keyword phrase) that match with your search criteria; you can note down these terms as well.
Once you done with it then we can move to filtering keyword phrase step.
Step 6 – Filtering of keyword phrase
Now you have competition level and monthly volume data for each search phrase.
Put all data (Keyword Phrase, competition level and monthly search volume) into excel sheet and sort it based on competition and then monthly search volume.
Select those keywords which have low competition level with a decent monthly search volume.
What could be a decent monthly search volume, you have to figure out by using average monthly search volume.
Select 4-5 keyword phrase from the list that have low competition level and decent monthly search volume and use it in your article.
You have done it
Yes you have done your keyword research. I know it’s a lengthy process but believe me once you start following it and by seeing its result you will not mind to spend couple of hours in Keyword Research.
Note: – It is suggested that try to build some backlinks for the ‘keyword Phrase’ used to retain your position in SERP.