Keyword Research for the beginner blogger

Keyword research is one of the most foundational steps for getting your blog off the ground and keep it running. A good and thorough keyword research not only gives you ideas for blogs that you can focus on but it also gives you an idea about the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. This article is about providing an understanding of Keyword Research for the beginner blogger.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is not just a fancy term. It comes under the strategy that is used to rank your articles or blogs organically on search engines like Google. It is one of the early steps in any online marketing campaign.

In simple terms, keyword research is the process of finding the search terms that your users are typing in search engines and the kind of effort that is required to rank for those keywords.

Keyword research is about finding the right balance between the search terms people are using, the monthly search volume of the search term and integration of keyword research into the list of blog ideas so that more people are able to find your blog in the organic results of search engines.

Keyword research is about finding the right set of keywords so that your blog can rank for the targeted keywords and is a subset of SEO.

How to do keyword research?

There is a traditional and modern way of conducting keyword research. Let us look at them separately to understand them in a better manner.

1. Traditional Keyword Research:

The traditional keyword research method is used to find a list of long-tail and medium-tail keywords that you can target from the list of short-tail keywords.

For instance, ‘digital marketing’ is the short-tail keyword or seed keyword. When searched for the term ‘Digital Marketing’, the search engines will throw suggested search terms like:

1. What are the types of digital marketing?

2. What are the 5 D’s of digital marketing?

3. How can I start digital marketing?

4. What are the 4 P’s of digital marketing?  

You will be able to draw a similar list of keywords by focusing on short tail keywords. Some other factors to keep into mind are the monthly search volume and ranking difficulty for a particular keyword.

The Google Keyword Planner, hosted under the Google Ads account gives you the list of monthly search volume for each of the target keywords and also provides you with the ranking difficulty for a particular keyword divided into low, medium and high.

By this method you will be able to draw a list of potential keywords that you can target for the next posts.

2. Modern Keyword Research

The modern keyword research is largely about finding keywords that your competitors are ranking for. This can be done using a premium keyword research tool.

There are some basic requirements for undertaking this route of keyword research. Your website should have some level of authority and should be ranking for some of the other keywords related to the niche you are in.

By finding out and targeting the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, your website or blog will be able to make rapid advances in terms of monthly traffic.

As said earlier, you would require a premium keyword research tool for undertaking this competitor based keyword research and these are costly tools. In my opinion, consider these once have some established base in your niche.

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You can learn about the basic steps for setting up your blog here.

You can also learn about the art of attracting high traffic here.

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