How to Use Keywords in Your Blogging Strategy.
Even though blogging has been around for a while, it looks a lot different today than it did in the early 2000s. In those days, people read your blog because they followed it.
Online behavior has changed after all then. While some people might shuffle onto a blog they like and subscribe to its email list for updates, many people determine blog content through search engines. With more people searching than ever before, it’s a great time for bloggers to research using keyword research in their content strategy.
This post was written for those that may be new to blogging, as well as those who have been blogging for some time but are just now starting to explore keyword research.
Ready? It’s time to jump into the beginner’s handle to keyword research for bloggers!
What are the keywords?
Keywords are the words someone types into a search engine.
People use search engines for all sorts of things — things like looking up movie times, seeing what the day’s weather will be like, or getting their local pizza place’s number. Every search is a quest for instructions, and the goal of search engines like Google is to supply the searcher with a satisfactory answer as quickly as possible.
What does this mean for you as a blogger? It means that if you want to write for these searchers, you’ll need to know the queries they’re asking (keywords) and deliver the explanation in your blog posts.
How will keywords switch my blog strategy?
Blog posts developed on the support of keyword research are different from other types of blog posts in that they focus on answering an existing question.
Comparison this with something like a blog post about a personal experience, or a post introducing a completely new idea — in both these scenarios, because your content doesn’t answer an actual question, it likely won’t get much traffic from search engines like Google, simply because no one is searching for it.
Does that mean you can only write to answer existing questions? Not at all! Even topics with no search requirement could get great engagement and traffic on other channels like Facebook or Twitter, but if you want long-term free traffic, the best place to get it is from Google, and the best way to get Google to send you that traffic is to build your blogs on the base of keyword research.
What keywords do I choose?
Just because you found a keyword in a keyword research tool doesn’t undoubtedly mean you should use it in your blogging planning. Once you have a list of keywords, it’s a good idea to whittle it down. Here’s how.
1. Appoint keywords that match your audience
Knowing your audience is mandatory for keyword research because it helps you filter out keywords that, although technically related to your topic, are an imbalance for your audience.
If you supplicant did so yet, document an ideal audience for your blog. For example, if you run a fitness blog, you could write down something as simple as a “fitness believer.” You could also go a bit deeper and create audience personality, full portrait of your ideal crowd that includes things like age, demographics, and interests.
The deeper your understanding of your ideal audience, the easier it will be to detect which keywords out of the bundle they would have searched for.
2. Classify each keyword’s difficulty score
You may also want to lessen down your keyword list to escape only those with an appropriate Difficulty Score, which Keyword Explorer will appoint to every keyword. That score is resolved by the strength of the pages that are currently ranking on page 1 for that keyword.
3. A glance at each keyword’s search volume
Search volume gives you an evaluation of how many people are searching for that keyword every month. It’s great to choose keywords that lots of people are searching for, but remind that quantity doesn’t always the same quality.
How do I use the keywords on my page?
When Google’s algorithm was less mellow than it is today, it was easy to get your page to rank at the top of search results for certain phrases by repeating that keyword many times on the page.
Over the years though, Google has gotten better at ranking pages that answer the objection, rather than just repeat it on the page. This is important to keep in mind because it’s fascinating to think that all you have to do with your keyword list is to add those words to your pages. To perform well in search engines though, you have to provide an answer to those queries that’s better than anything else out there.
Here are some topple for using keywords to guide your blog content:
- Keywords are the input:- You’re constructing the output. Rather of asking yourself “How can I add this keyword on my page?” ask yourself, “How can I answer these queries?”
- You don’t have to have a split page for every keyword you want to rank for: If you’re writing a blog post about “choosing the best casual shoes,” for example, it makes perfect sense to answer multiple questions related to that point within the same post, such as “road vs. trail casual shoes” and “running shoe features.”
- Check out the pages that are directly ranking for your target keyword and think about how you can create a page more than that.