As a blogger, all you want is an avalanche of traffic to your website. What can be more satisfying than getting exposed to a vast audience? After all, your journey to build money-making websites depends on the number of readers you have.
But getting the attention of target readers is anything but coincidence. If you have been writing some good blogs and waiting for readers to arrive, you can only meet disappointment. You will need some SEO tips and tricks to guide the flow of interested readers to your website.
How?
Well, typing a few words into the search box of the search engine – starts it all.
Your target audience has a question/problem for which they are looking for answer/solution. You have information, solution or answer the readers are seeking which you have incorporated in your blog posts. But to reach your blog, they will first type question in the search box of the search engine.
For example, “How to find the right keywords for your niche to rank higher?”. The words typed in the search box are known as keywords.
And keyword research is one of the most crucial and practical activities in the SEO field. But why are they so important? Because
- Keyword research is one of the simplest and free ways to enhance your website traffic.
- Right keywords contribute to improving the rank of your blog in the search results.
- It not only helps in listing words, phrases and terms for SEO targeting but also enables you to understand your target audience.
- Right keywords ensure that you only get the flow of visitors who are interested in your niche.
- It also helps you to predict change in market condition, a shift in audience demands, content that web users are seeking actively.
Thus, keyword research is something you should take seriously.
You will have to find the keywords that your target audience can type and use them in your blog marketing strategy. So far, so good.
Now, the problem is not just any keyword will fetch you the desired results. Then, what? You need to find the right keywords that suit your niche. How? Let’s jump right into it.
Wait, before we discuss the steps of finding the right keywords for your niche, you must get a brief idea of different categories of keywords. Let me give you a quick introduction to them all.
Brand Keywords
As the name suggests, the keywords or key phrases consists of the brand name. When you are starting, your brand name is not known to people. Therefore, these keywords do not produce high volume impressions or views. Although they fall short on volume, they offer the best conversion rate in both paid and natural search results.
Product Keywords
These keywords or phrases consists of words that describe what your product/service does or what problem it can solve. The product keywords list can be huge depending on the how diverse you product/service offerings are.
The cost-per-action or CPA of these keywords is not as impressive as brand keywords because the audience searching these terms are one step back in decision making cycle. But product keywords can help you win your keyword-game by fetching high volume.
Complementary Product Keywords
Complementary product keywords are those things that are related to your product like “shoe polish” if your product is a shoe. These terms can be product terms for someone else. They offer marginal conversions.
Audience Keywords
Your target audience does not stick to set keywords. They have a wide range of terms when it comes to searching. To find those keywords, you need to understand what are the interests and searching habits of your audience. These keywords offer high impression volume.
Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords used to offer the highest conversion rate and CPA only falling behind from brand keywords. After their recent algorithm updates, Google has notched up their quality score requirements making it difficult to get cost-per-clicks on these keywords.
Substitute Product Keywords
Substitute words are the words that a user can type instead of your product. Their performance was impacted similarly to that of competitive keywords after Google updates.
Now, that we have discussed different types of keywords, it is time to check out some steps to find the right niche keywords for higher ranking.
Creating A Seed Keyword List
Seed keyword list is a set of initial keyword idea. How do you create a seed keyword list? Simple, write down the different keyword categories we discussed above. Done. Good. Now, try to brainstorm and fill out keywords below each keyword category. Focus more on brand and product keywords. Here are some tips to help you brainstorm seed keywords.
- Analyze Your Target Audience
Analyze your target audience to see what terms they might use to describe your products/services. What are the relevant keywords that they use in their everyday lives that are closely related to your products/services?
- Find Popular Search Terms
You can use analytic tools, Google Webmaster tools and weblogs to find search terms that your audience is using to reach you. If you have access to internet site search data, you can identify the terms that people are using in their searches.
- Use Tools to Get Some Suggestions
Are you still stuck and can’t find seed keywords? Don’t worry. There are many online tools to give you a helping hand. Tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Small SEO Tools, Word Stream keyword suggestion tool, etc. suggest you right keywords for your seed keywords list.
- Take Help from Competitors
Now, I am not saying to go and ask your competitors because they would probably not tell. But you can use tools such as SEMRush, Soovie, etc. to check keywords your competitors are using.
Find Niche Keywords Using a Keyword Research Tool
Once you have your seed keyword list, you can start building your niche keyword list from it. How? By using your favourite keyword research tool. (We discussed a few free keyword research tools in the point above.)
As Google brings the majority of traffic to most websites, many website owners stick Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Start entering your keywords in the search section and see what keywords are most searched or better performing. And this time, we will focus on numbers – traffic volume estimate.
When you are using Google AdWords or any other keyword planner, you must use various features and advanced options to get better results.
Refining the List of Niche Keywords
The last step of finding high-ranking niche keywords is improving your niche keywords list to find the best ones. There are no hard-and-fast rules to do it. But you can use some tips to streamline your list:
- If you see more of audience keywords than brand and product keywords, you need to select the most interesting ones from the former list. Focus on categories that are closest to the centre of the target.
- Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to check the keyword competition for easier winning. Alternatively, you can also use the Moz tool (this feature is not free) to get a keyword difficulty score. If you are confident about specific highly competitive keywords, don’t be discouraged to use them. These keywords will perform but it will be harder or will take a little longer to see the desired results.
- You can also use search engines to refine your niche keywords list. Enter the most important keywords from your list into the search box and check the results. If there are marginal terms with ambiguous meaning, you can check them on a search engine and drop them if necessary. You can also use search engines to list down potential negative keywords.
- When you are going through your keyword list, group them semantically. For example, if you have keywords such as – “free keywords tool’, “free keyword research tool”, “free keyword suggestion tools”, etc. You can group them in “free keyword” group. This type of semantic grouping will help you to drop keywords with lower search count.
Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are a great way to outrank your competition. These keywords are generic phrases containing three or more words. Long tail keywords are considered crucial for niche targeting. Using long-tail keywords in your blog can improve your search engine result pages (SERPs) ranking.
How?
Your entire blog depends on how you offer the right information to your users based on their searches. But there is a catch. Your target audience does not search with head keywords. Instead, they search with long phrases.
In 2016, Google increased the character limit for SERP titles and descriptions. Thus, long-tail keywords are a vital part in improving rankings of your blog. These keywords add context to your blog content and offer better conversion rate.
Finding the right set of niche keywords that will help you rank higher depends on your blog and your target audience. If your blog niche is complex, you will have to devote more time while refining your keywords and creating the final list.
Okay, you managed to find and add some good performing niche keywords list. Is your website all good now?
No. You need to understand that keyword research effort, just like your online marketing effort, will never have a dead end. Why? Because, audience preferences, online trends and search engine algorithms are constantly changing. Thus, you need to monitor and tweak your niche keywords from time to time to keep up the volume of conversions and impressions.
Creating, refining and analyzing your niche keyword list is a never-ending process. But over time, you will get an understanding of your audience which will make finding the right keywords easier.
Which methods do you use to find niche keywords? Were there any keyword research points that I missed out? Do let me know in the comment section.
The post Finding Keywords to Boost Your Organic Search Traffic Like A Boss appeared first on Digital Media News & Training.
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