Are you looking to increase organic traffic to your website? If you have a public blog or money making site, then we all know the answer. ABSOLUTELY!
And there are many ways to accomplish this. But one method in particular can bring on that exponential boost you’re looking for.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keyword research.
This is the art of knowing what search terms your target readers are searching for on a search engine like Google, and writing articles that will be found by those readers. It can help you choose your next topic, grow your website, and ensure you give readers who visit your site the best user experience.
Through the use of proper SEO keyword management, you can watch your site become a viable competitor on the World Wide Web and drive more traffic every day.
How Can I Use Keyword Research to Improve My Site’s Traffic?
When your keywords are properly chosen and utilized, you will begin to see an increase in traffic to your website.
This is because if you do proper keyword research, you can find terms or phrases that people actually type into Google and are not too competitive, so that your blog can legitimately show up in Google for it.
Choosing the Right Keywords
Now, here comes the million-dollar question… How can you find the right keywords for you?
When it comes to keywords research, there are two things you need to be able to answer:
- Do people actually search for that phrase?
- Is it so competitive that I could never rank for it?
For most keyword tools, these two questions can be answered with two number sets:
1. Searches Per Month
2. Competition Score
There are a lot of keyword research tools that provide these numbers for you, and I have a couple of them listed below (some free, have daily free use, have free trials and others are just paid).
- KWFinder
- KeywordTool.io
- AdWord and SEO Keyword Permutation Generator
- Google Correlate
- Keywords Everywhere
- And more!
However, for this article, I’m going to use Ahrefs.com to show you how you can get that information – and you can sign up for a 7 day $7 trial of the program.
Step 1: Click on Keywords Explorer, and then type in an initial idea and click search
Step 2: Click on “All Keyword Ideas”
This will now show you a list of keyword ideas based on the phrase you typed in. But here’s what’s most important. At #1 in the picture above, you can see how many people type that into Google per month, and in #2 you can see Keyword Difficulty (KD) score. This is a score from 1-100 with 1 being SUPER easy to rank for, and 100 being impossible.
So, if you’re a newer blog, a good rule of thumb is only go after keywords that:
1. Have at least 300 searches per month
2. Have a KD score less than 10
If you find that, and it would make a good article for your readers, then you’ve found a keyword that can and will help grow your blog. Here’s an example:
I typed in “Kindle Keyword tools” into Ahrefs, and found the following.
That’s over 7600 people per month that type in “Best mystery books” and only has a KD score of 7. Not only would that be an interesting piece of content for readers (if that’s your niche) but would also bring you thousands of new readers every month.
How powerful is that?
[bctt tweet=”When it comes to keyword research, there are two things you need to be able to answer: do people actually search for that phrase and is it so competitive that I could never rank for it? #Youpreneur” via=”no”]
Examples of SEO Research in Action
I can’t say for sure that the writers of the following articles did SEO research. However, if they didn’t then they got super lucky because each of the following examples are small websites that wrote one specific blog post that brings in over 50% of their total traffic – with the exception of one.
Example 1: A book review site
A site called Top Sci Fi Books, is a website devoted to discussing and reviewing the best science fiction books on the market. However, if they had just randomly picked articles to write about science fiction, they wouldn’t have grown as fast as they have.
As you can see, they strategically choose to write an article titled “Books Like Ready Player One.” With 3,900 people searching that phrase every month, it’s no wonder a small site like that can rank so well for it – without being SEO masters.
Example 2: Food Delivery but niche
In this example an website called Food Delivery Guru and one of its most read articles is Meal Delivery for One Person.
What’s interesting is that if the author had done the more obvious “meal delivery” it never would have been read because this was too competitive. Although 19,000 visitors per month would be nice, a KD score of 88 is almost impossible.
However, the website’s very niche term of “meal delivery for one person” not only has legitimate traffic, but a MUCH lower KD score of 13. While this KD score is above my rule of thumb, understand that this website has a bit more age to it, and can therefore go past the KD score of 10 rule.
Use Keywords to Help Build Your Content
Keywords can be a powerful step to creating excellent content. If done right, you can not only create content you know people are looking for, you can also ensure your writing gets read every month.
Keyword Research is a vital part of my content marketing strategy. To this day, I use Keyword Research to figure out my next article. Instead of writing an article about how much self-publishing costs, I did my research, and found that it was too difficult because of websites like Self-publishing School.
However, I did find an idea on the differences between EPUB vs Mobi vs PDF. Not only are 2,400 people searching for that exact phrase, but it only has a KD score of 5.
If I had gone with the other idea, I don’t think that article would have been found. But thanks to keyword research, I found a topic that will not only help 2,400 people, but will help grow my website.
That’s the power of keyword research.
