Keyword Analysis and Search Engine Marketing
Tips for Bloggers and Niche Marketers
Blogger’s have unique needs when it comes to Keyword Research, ones that aren’t typically covered in most keyword analysis articles. Over the next two weeks I’m going to share my keyword research strategies with you and show you how I approach this task from a few different angles.
I’m keen to hear your experiences and ideas too, so don’t forget to leave a comment if you don’t think I’ve covered a topic well enough or if you have something else to add.
You’re not going to get anywhere unless you know where you’re going… I’m sure you’ve heard that advice before, but I can tell you it’s even more important when it comes to keyword research… in fact I would say it is the most critical stage of the process — fail to get this right and all you’re going to end up with is a jumbled list of keywords that you’ll probably never use in any meaningful way.
Traditionally, keyword research has one of three main goals:
If you’re a blogger (even if you’re not this may still be relevant), then you should also be considering a few more options:
Depending on your specific situation, there may be other goals you want to achieve too, but for most blogger’s these will be common tasks that you should examine in varying levels of detail.
Most of those points need a little explanation, so let’s start at the top and cover the basics of each one (remember we’re just talking about setting your goals here, we’ll talk about how to achieve them in later parts of this series):
Niche Research
Your main task here will be to determine which niche(s) of your chosen topic have an active market base that you consider are worth pursuing. As a general rule, the more competitive a market is, the tighter your niche will need to be.
The basic idea is to collect and analyse macro-level data.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you want your pages to rank high for popular searches on Google, then you need to know what keywords people are searching for, how many of them are doing it and how much competition you’ll be up against for that term. But don’t stop there, to make SEO an effective strategy you’ll also need to categorise your keywords (find topic ’clusters’) and use them to develop an appropriate link structure for your site. You’ll also want to spend time considering keyword intent – just because a keyword is showing high traffic numbers, doesn’t mean you’ll want to target it on your site.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns
PPC campaigns focus on huge lists of long tail keywords with specific intent (usually looking for keywords people use when intending to make a purchase, although that varies with the goals of the campaign) and emphasis on negative keywords to rule out irrelevant matches. The more relevant the keyword is to the specific intent of the campaign goals, the more valuable that keyword becomes.
Identifying keyword trends across multiple social networks
There’s no need to limit keyword research to search engines any more - people can find your content in many ways and social media networks are every bit as important for many bloggers. Analysis is a little different here, depending on the social network you’re interested in, it could be more ‘topic’ based, rather than keyword specific, but your ultimate aim is to identify ways to categorise or present your content to give it the best chance of becoming popular.
Competitor/Peer keyword analysis
It’s always good to have a look at what keywords your competitors (and peers) are targeting and ranking well for. It’ll give you more ideas about how to manage your link structure and categorise keywords, but taking this a step further it also helps you to identify which sources you should be targeting for links or guest posts for particular topics.
If you’ve got an article that targets a specific keyword, then it makes sense to get it visible on the site(s) that have a better presence for those keyword terms… it also helps you to identify these possible sites in the first place.
Finding the questions people need answered
Finding questions people are asking isn’t about driving traffic to your site (although it will help with long tail searches and building relevance to your main keyword themes), it’s about keeping them there and identifying valuable content to blog about. If a reader searches for something specific, and you provide a comprehensive answer, then you’ve provided closure on that train of thought. It gives them time to stop and see what else your site can offer them rather than click away immediately and continue looking for what they were after in the first place.
Research for an individual posts
Keyword research is an ongoing process - it’s not just something you should do prior to launching and then never look at again, each post you make gives you further opportunities to maximise your keyword exposure. There are two main aims when researching keywords for an individual post, finding the right way to structure the title, and identifying related keywords to add relevance to your main subject.
Before I finish up, another reminder of the importance of setting your keyword research goals… it’s not all about SEO, or about finding a niche – to get real value out of keyword analysis, you need to consciously have that end point in mind, the better you can define what you’re looking for, the easier it will be to find.
In the next part of this series I’ll have a quick look at the tools I use for keyword research… so until then, I hope I’ve given you a few things to think about at least.
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This is very interesting! I have enjoyed reading this very insightful post. Very engaging and informative. Thanks for sharing.
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