Keyword Analysis and Search Engine Marketing
Tips for Bloggers and Niche Marketers
This is part five of my series on Comprehensive Keyword Research for Bloggers and Niche Marketers, which started with Defining your Keyword Research Goals. Today’s topic is how to find the questions your readers want answered.
One of the more important goals for bloggers doing keyword analysis is (should be!) finding questions that are being asked in their niche. Not only are these questions usually themed around popular, high traffic keywords (which also get covered in the post and help build up themed relevance to similar articles you link to), but the precise question itself is also a highly focused long tail keyphrase that usually gives you a complete subject for a post (sometimes more than one).
The beauty of using keyword research to find questions your potential customers are already asking, is that these questions are real - not just some marketers best guess. You get the chance to study the way the questions are phrased, how many different questions are being asked, different ways of asking the same question etc. the amount of information you can get is well worth the effort to find out.
So how do you find these questions? It couldn’t be easier.
The easiest way to track them down is using your favourite keyword search tool (Wordze, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google Keyword Tool etc.), all you need to do is add some key question words to your regular keyword searches (how, what, when, why, who, “can I”, “do I” etc.), so if you’re interested in ‘RSS’ for example, a good idea would be to search for: how rss, you’ll get back a wide variety of questions, just using the free Google Keywords Tool, I got 150 of them, here’s a screenshot of the top few ranked by average search volume:
Yahoo Answers is an absolute gold mine.
The way to find the questions you’re looking for is via their search function. You need to click on the advanced search link, and make sure that you’re only searching in the question text and not in the answers, then search on topics as shown above (how keyword etc.), here’s what it should look like:
This simple search generated 833 results… plenty of food for thought…
There are more of these QA type sites out there too, you might find your niche is better represented on wikianswer for example.
Power Tip: When you do a search like this on Yahoo Answers, at the bottom of the search results page you’ll see an RSS link for the search. Add this link to your feed reader (it always lists them in reverse chronological order, not by relevance as in the search itself) and you’ll automatically be updated every time a new question is asked on that subject… how cool is that!
*Note: There appears to be a bug in the Yahoo Answers RSS feed if you include quotes with your keyword. Searches in the form: how keyword1 keyword2 return results as expected, but: how “keyword1 keyword2″ does not. Thanks to @doublehead for pointing this out! Also, if your RSS results still look odd, make sure you start your search from the ‘advanced’ search each time, starting with the advanced form and then doing another search from the regular search box will lose your focus on questions only and weaken the results.
If you’ve already got a dedicated reader base, why not just come right out and ask them… they’ve surely got a lot of questions they want answered, open up your comments section and let the questions start rolling in.
Some of the results could sound a little ‘forced’ as people try to think of something on the spot, just to be included in the comments, but the majority should be highly focused to your blog. As long as you are happy with your current market demographics, there is probably no better source than asking your existing readers for ideas.
Look at the top blogs in your niche and take note of any questions or confusion that readers show in the comments of their articles. Some of these articles may be a little tough to wade through if most of the comments are general praise for the article, but once a bit of controversy starts to show, or if the topic isn’t fully explained, you will often find questions from people looking to dig a little deeper.
There’s also a chance that popular blog in your niche has also come right out and asked their readers for questions… well, there’s no reason you can’t look at the comments there either, if you can find one of these posts on a high traffic blog, you’ll often find a truck load of quality questions the market is hungry to have answered.
If you use web analytics applications, or just dig through your raw log files, take note of all the search terms used to find your site, there’s a good chance there will be plenty of questions listed there that some of your articles only partly answer.
These results have the added bonus that visitors have actually found YOUR site using those queries. Many of them could be for articles where you have specifically targeted that question, but others will be related searches that you haven’t really answered in depth. The latter allows you to focus on new topics that you should post about, the former allows you to judge the effectiveness of your articles on those subjects - how popular is that article? do those visitors stay and read other articles on your site or leave disappointed?
So what questions do you have about Keyword Research that you want answered? I know my blog is only new and readership is fairly low at the moment, but the comments section is open and I’d love to hear any questions you have!
Only one more part to go in this series of posts - next time we look at how to bring all this research together and actually turn it into a plan that you can use. Thanks for reading.
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[…] That’s enough for today… I do have one more list of keywords to create (or more precisely questions), but I’ll cover that in the next part of the series where we’ll look at Questions and Answers your readers want to know. […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 27, 2008…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web…….
[…] 5 Keyword Research Tips to Finding the Questions Your Readers Want Answered, keywordsem.com […]
Great post, Yahoo Answers has been a tremendous source of traffic for one of my clients. Not too sure about the wiki idea though.
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[…] article that I tweeted was 5 Keyword research tips to finding the questions your readers want answered - in all, 116 articles were submitted this time, again on a wide range of subjects and no doubt […]
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I have a blog and website that focuses on a niche within the concrete industry. Interior decorative concrete floors. I sell a miracle product for resurfacing concrete floors. My biggest obstacle is reaching the consumer. It’s an online business.
I rely on content like yours to help me with my marketing.
Long tail keywords. How, what, why, who, where. Your info is valuable. I will be applying what you just taught me in about 1 minute.
Thanks.
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[…] 5 Keyword Research Tips to Finding the Questions Your Readers Want Answered by @MartyJ […]
Really useful info and simply explained … I can still take it all in and I’m tired enough to drop. Thank you.