There are many tools available when it comes to how to do keyword research, we will look at several here, but first let’s look at why we need to do keyword research as part of our effort before we start blogging.
Fundamentally we need to do keyword research so that we can be found in the search engines. SEO optimization is all about getting found for the solution to problems people are experiencing. Keywords are the signal you send to the search engines to let them know what problem you are solving. I like to think of search engines like a big dictionary for problem solving.
Think about how you look for solutions with a search engine, it will give you a good starting point. When it comes to starting a new blog, blogs do best if they are designed around a tightly clustered group of keywords that draw your potential client or reader in as they search out answers to questions or solutions to problems.
Let’s look at why keyword research is important from these bloggers’ perspective:
- Jay Rickmann says: Why Keyword Research Is An Important Aspect of SEO
- Patrick shares his insight about why keyword research is so important too.
When you are first putting a blog together you need to focus on a tight group of keywords around one concept, sometimes called a niche. The more focused and tighter your keyword clusters are the more targeted your audience will be. Targeted is good, broad causes confusion. If you look at Patrick’s website you can see that his target audience is new bloggers, or potential bloggers. The products that he offers for sale on his site are designed to help people just starting out with resources to acquire the tools necessary to start a blog.
Such items a new blogger would need are good keyword research tool –Jaaxy is the industry standard. I highly recommend simply reading the sales page, take the free trial and watching the training videos. You will learn a lot about how to do keyword research even if you don’t purchase the product right now.
I agree with Patrick about Genesis and WordPress being super easy to start off with in terms of setting up your blog, and Scribe works well with the Genesis Framework as they are produced by the same company. Scribe will help you make sure your posts are SEO optimized before you publish them. Personally, I like and use Ionos for my hosting needs as they are easy to use, have a variety of hosting options and super quick response for customer service answers.
When it comes to how to do keyword research, we need to break this down into two sections, before you start blogging and after you start blogging.
How To Do Keyword Research Before You Start Blogging
First you need to narrow down your niche, the area you are going to be blogging about. Sure you could blog about dogs, but you are more likely to make sales and develop a following if you blog about a specific breed of dog or even a specific breed of dog that does something special. For example Labrador Retrievers that work as Service Dogs.
In our example of Labrador Retrievers that work as service dogs that would be our main keyword phrase, except that I just did a quick Google Adwords Keyword search for that particular phrase and no one is searching for that specific term.
However with some additional research I discovered that though the keyword Labrador retriever gets 246,000 exact matches a day, that the term Labrador Retrievers (with an s) get 3600 and has low competition, in other words it isn’t going to cost much to advertise for the word combination in Google (not that we are going to be using Google Adwords here, I just use it to gauge whether I think it is likely that there will be a lot of competition for that word in Google)
Then hopping over to Google itself, I plug the keyword in and find that there are some blogs on the first page toward the bottom that are not authority sites. If you plug in service dogs you get a whole new set of keyword options and directions you can travel while narrowing down exactly who you want to talk to and about what.
The goal is to come up with a series of ten to fifteen keywords and long tail phrases that you can use as the framework for your blog.
Krystian Włodarczyk explains the process of keyword research in his post how to select top keywords for SEO in great detail.
How To Do Keyword Research After You Start You Blog
Now that you have your framework keywords down and done, your initial posts will be using them as the main keyword phases (one phrase per post). As you produce more content find keywords that are closely related to the framework keywords with some traffic and low competition.
Once you become established you can shoot for the more competitive keywords; coming out of the gate it is better to start with low competition keywords so as not to get lost in the “noise” of the search engines with the authority sites.
Leslie Angelsey has written a good article on how to select keywords for blog post writing. When it comes to picking effective keywords you really need to read what Michael Mothner has to say about the picking effective SEO keywords Moz.com also has a detailed article, actually a series of articles on How to do keyword research
SEO Optimization Tips To Start A New blog:
Chapter One – How To Do Keyword Research Before You Start Blogging (You are here)
Chapter Two –Permalinks The Secret Of Editing For SEO Optimization
Chapter Three – Related Keywords For Posting in Clusters
Chapter Four – Tying Related Posts Together
Chapter Five – Interlinking Your Posts
Chapter Six – How Do You Add Your URL To The Search Engines
Chapter Seven – Marketing Blog Posts – Don’t Be A Wall Flower
If this has helped you please share the post with your friends on Facebook who are looking to start a blog, for fun or profit. And be sure to connect with me on Facebook – in my world, one can’t have too many friends 🙂
