A beginner’s guide to keyword research for bloggers [2024]

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SEO is crucial for long term blog growth, and at the heart of SEO is keyword research. But what exactly is keyword research, and why is it so important for blog growth? Find out in this comprehensive guide to keyword research for bloggers – and watch your blog traffic soar!

 

Keyword research is an essential part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – you’ve spent time writing your blog post and you want people to read it! Preferably lots of people. This is where keyword research can help you. Get keyword research right and you will be able to get your content in front of the very people who will really want to read it… and are most likely to want to become loyal long-term followers of your blog.

But there are two big problem that bloggers often fall into:

• not writing what people want to read

OR

• writing what people want to read but not writing it in a way that will help people find it easily

Keyword research addresses both these problems.

Before you write a blog post, you need understand who your target audience is for that post and what they are most likely to be typing into search engines. Then you can use those exact search terms in your blog post so that you start ranking for them.

The concept of ‘keyword research’ is sometimes seen by bloggers as confusing, unnecessary and a bit ‘artificial’. But actually it’s none of those things, it is very simple basic marketing: providing customers with what they want.

Keyword research is about finding out what your customers (i.e. your readers) are looking for and helping them find it on your website not someone else’s!

But often advice on this topic is made overly complicated or full of jargon. I promise you will get neither of those things here! This is my plainly written, jargon-free guide to keyword research.

 

But first, let’s start right at the beginning…

 

What are keywords?

Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO. Keywords are words (or phrases) that you want your blog post to be found for, when a potential reader types that word or phrase into a search engine.

Keywords are not usually one word, but rather a keyword phrase such as ‘how to do keyword research’ or ‘easy lamb bolognese’.

Long keyword phrases are known as long tail keywords. Long tail keywords tend to have less search volume (less people searching for that word) BUT it tends to be easier to rank for long tail keywords as they have less competition.

Your focus keyword is the main keyword/keyword phrase you want your blog post to be found for. For example, for this blog post my focus keyword is ‘keyword research for bloggers’. The focus keyword is what you put into the ‘focus keyphrase’ section of the Yoast SEO plugin.

However, you don’t want your blog post to rank for only 1 keyword! You want to try and get your blog post to rank for as many relevant keywords as possible. These extra keywords are known as secondary keywords.

By optimizing your blog for both your focus keyword AND a selection of secondary keywords, you increase your chances of ranking on search engines and increase the number of searches you are likely to be found in, and so the number of page views you are likely to get from search engines.

 

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is all about identifying who your audience is, working out what problems/questions they have and which words they are using in search engines to try and get answers to their problems.

You can then use the results of your keyword research to create content that your ideal readers will want to read, and to optimize that content for search engines so that your target audience will be able to find it.

Put simply, Keyword research is trying to get inside the head of your ideal readers to work out what they want and then creating content that they want to read and helping them find that content easily.

 

 

Why is keyword research so important?

Keyword research will help you start thinking in terms of your target audience – who are they and what are they looking for? And crucially, which words are they using in search engines to try and find what they are looking for?

One big mistake that bloggers make is creating content that they want to write, rather than the content that their readers want to read. Now obviously if your blog is primarily a hobby and you are not particularly bothered if no one really reads your blog, then writing what you want to write is absolutely fine!

But if you want your blog to be successful, both in terms of pageviews and money, then writing what people want to read is absolutely vital!

If you take the time to work out what your audience wants, and create content that answers their questions, problems and desires, you’ll rank higher in search engines, you’ll rank for more keywords and you’ll see long term growth in search engine traffic to your blog.

This type of ‘organic’ traffic is sustainable and tends to get better over time with relatively little extra effort (unlike social media, which requires continued high levels of effort to sustain growth). Put another way: if your blog relies on social media for its traffic and you are sick for a month, chances are your blog traffic will be hit hard. However, if your blog relies on SEO and search engine traffic and you are sick for a month, the chances are this will have very little effect on your blog traffic – in fact, you may even see an increase in search engine traffic during this time!

 

But how do you do it?

 

How to do keyword research

There are two distinct phases to keyword research: ‘big picture’ keyword research and individual blog post keyword research. I call this ‘macro’ keyword research and ‘micro’ keyword research.

‘Big Picture’ or ‘macro’ keyword research involves identifying your target audience and working out what they want. This process is how you will come up with your best content ideas for your Content Calendar.

‘Blog Post Level’ or ‘micro’ keyword research involves trying to find out which particular keywords you should optimize your individual blog posts for. In other words which search terms are your potential readers actually using to get answers to their questions.

During both phases you also need to pay attention to what your competition is doing to ensure you are not trying to optimize your blog posts with keywords that are too competitive.

The final step is to use those keywords correctly in your blog post so that search engines recognize that your blog post is a good answer to that search query.

Before we go into the nitty gritty of exactly how you do this, let’s briefly look at an example…

 

Keyword research example: this blog post

Through macro keyword research I have identified that my ideal reader wants a simple, jargon free guide to keyword research that is relevant to bloggers (as opposed to giant companies or brick and mortar businesses, for example).

Through micro keyword research I have identified my focus keyword phrase: ‘beginner’s guide to keyword research for bloggers’ and a selection of secondary keywords: ‘how to do keyword research’, ‘keyword research for SEO’ and ‘what is keyword research?’ ‘beginner’s guide to keyword research’ etc…

Finally I have used my focus keyword in key places throughout this blog post (title, meta, slug, alt tags, first paragraph & headings) in order to ensure my blog post ranks for ‘beginner’s guide to keyword research for bloggers’. I have also used my secondary keywords in the text and (where possible) in headings in order to give myself a chance to rank for more than one keyword.

 

So now let’s look at each part step by step…

 

Keyword Research at Macro Level

 

Step 1: Identify your audience

This is super important. If you don’t know who your audience is, you won’t know whose questions to answer and therefore which keywords to target.

Take a moment to jot down some ‘facts’ about your target audience. How old are they? Are they male, female or both? What is their family situation? What level of income do they have? And crucially – what do they want to know about that you can help them with?

 

Step 2: Working out what your audience wants

This second step of keyword research involves trying to get inside your ideal reader’s head. What are these people looking for? What are their questions and problems? What kinds of search terms are they using to help them solve those problems/questions? Create a list of ideas. There are lots of great free keyword research tools that can help you with this phase.

 

Free keyword research tools

Contrary to what other people may tell you, you do not have to spend a fortune on expensive keyword research tools. Many of the best ones are free! Here are my favourites…

Existing popular posts

One of the best indicators of what your audience wants is your existing popular posts. Go to Google Analytics and look at your top posts (REPORTS => ENGAGEMENT => PAGE PATH & SCREEN CLASS & set the dates for at least the last 3 months)  Can you spot any trends? Can you spot any gaps? Can you think of similar content that you could produce?

Searches on your blog

Another great way to discover what YOUR audience is looking for is to look at what they are searching for on YOUR blog. To find your site’s searches in Google Analytics follow this tutorial. This will give you a list of all the searches on your site in your chosen time period in order of what people search for most. It makes for fascinating reading!

READ MORE => How to set up Google Analytics 4 on a WordPress blog

Google Search Console

One of my favourite keyword research tools is Google Search Console. Its insights are like gold dust. You can use it in lots of different ways, but my favourite is to go to PERFORMANCE => SEARCH RESULTS, toggle on CLICKS, IMPRESSIONS, CTR and POSITION and order by POSITION, then scroll through the results. Look to see what search results you are ranking highly for. Pay particular attention to any search terms you rank well for which you don’t really have any content specifically aimed at that search term. For example, when I did this for my food blog, Easy Peasy Foodie, I noticed that I ranked at position 1.1 for ‘Leftover Lamb Pasta’ and 1.3 for ‘Leftover Lamb Pasta Bake’ yet I didn’t have a recipe specifically called Leftover Lamb Pasta or Leftover Lamb Pasta Bake!

READ MORE => How to use Google Search Console to grow your blog traffic

What your audience are telling you

Another easy one. What are your audience actually asking for? Chances are every week you are being asked for something by your readers, either via email, social media or even face to face. Over time you should be able to build up a picture of what your readers are really interested in. And what subjects they want you to write about.

 

Paid keyword research tools

Right now, I only recommend one paid keyword research tool, and that’s KeySearch* You can use KeySearch for both Macro and Micro keyword research.

Find out why I recommend KeySearch and how to get 30% off KeySearch here: KeySearch Review: Is KeySearch worth the cost? [2024]

Find out how I use KeySearch for keyword research here: How to use KeySearch for keyword research: step-by-step tutorial [2024]

 

Step 3:  Prioritize content based on keyword research

Now it is time to prioritize those ideas you’ve got from step 2 based on two criteria: search volume and competition.

Because here’s the thing. There are 2 big mistakes you can make with keyword research: one is targeting keywords with too few searches, the other is targeting keywords with too many searches!

Sounds paradoxical doesn’t it? But actually it makes perfect sense. The first is more straightforward. If your keyword has a low search volume (in other words very few people use that search term), then you will get very little search engine traffic, if any, from that keyword.

If on the other hand, your keyword has very high search volumes, then chances are you will have a lot of competition – and unless you have a website that is very highly optimized for SEO and which has a lot of authority, you are not likely to appear on page 1 or even page 2, and when you consider that 95% of searchers don’t look past page 1 of Google, that’s pretty pointless too.

So what should you do? The idea is to find the sweet spot, or as I like to call it the ‘gold dust’. Keyword research gold dust is where you find a search term that has reasonable search volumes and relatively little competition. Why is this such gold dust? Because Google is very keen on relevance.

Put simply Google would rather give you a result that answers your question perfectly, but is from a smaller website, than an answer that doesn’t quite answer your question from a bigger, more authoritative website.

THIS IS REALLY GOOD NEWS PEOPLE!!

This is essentially how I grew my food blog Easy Peasy Foodie so fast

By using keywords with moderate search volumes and low to zero competition for that specific keyword you can trigger amazing blog growth from a constant stream of high quality traffic.

Not only is targeting those more specific ‘long tail’ keywords great for search engine traffic in the short term, it’s also great for driving long term traffic too. Because long tail keywords are more specific, you are likely to be attracting the sort of people who will be interested, not just in that one blog post, but the rest of your content as well, and hopefully any products and/or services that you have to offer! This is good news for the long-term growth and stability of your blog.

SOUNDS GREAT IN THEORY, BUT HOW DO YOU THIS PRACTICALLY?

There are a variety of tools which will help you organize and prioritize your ideas: some of these are paid tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz and KeySearch. But you can also use free tools like Google Trends and Google’s own search results.

Use your chosen keyword research tool to identify how much search volume each of your potential keywords has and how strong the competition is for each keyword. Once you’ve done that, you need to prioritize that list in order from best to worst, based on BOTH search volume and competition.

To make this easier to do practically, give each blog post idea a score out of 5 for both search volume and competition. Use these scores to give each keyword a total score out of 10. Finally, rank your posts from best (10) to worst (2). Your 10s are the keywords with the biggest traffic potential, so it makes sense to write the 10s first, then the 9s and so on.

Need help with this? I’ve written a complete step by step guide to identifying high volume, low competition keywords using Google Trends – where I take you one step at a time through how to do keyword research for your blog (including examples!), plus provide you with the perfect tool to make keyword research simple – my FREE Keyword Research Calculator! This easy to use spreadsheet automatically calculates which of your blog post ideas are most likely to get the most search engine traffic.

If you would prefer to use Google Search Results to your keyword research, then check out my complete guide to using Google Search Results for keyword research.

If you would prefer to use a paid tool for keyword research, then check out my step-by-step KeySearch tutorial.

 

Step 4:  Create content based on what your audience are searching for

This is the opposite of what most bloggers do, but it is absolutely what you need to be doing if you want your blog to be successful.

Instead of starting from a list of things you want to blog about, start with your list of ideas from Step 3. Use these ideas to fill up your blog’s editorial calendar.

Ideally you would want to start with your number 1 idea and work down the list, but in reality you will have other things to think about: some blog post ideas will be seasonal, so best fitted in the correct season; there will be other things you need to blog about – for example sponsored content, posts promoting your own products, posts related to the latest news in your niche… but in and around fixed commitments, write content based on the best performers from your keyword research.

 

Now it’s time to look keyword research at micro level…

 

Step 5:  Do a more in-depth keyword analysis before writing a blog post

At the macro level you looked at general blog post ideas and identified which scored best when rated against search volumes and competition. Now it’s time to drill down and look a bit more in detail at one particular idea.

It’s important to do this for two reasons: first to find the ‘perfect’ keyword to be your focus keyword. And secondly to find good candidates for those all-important secondary keywords.

 

An example of keyword research at blog post level…

Let’s take an example from my food blog this time. Let’s say, in my macro keyword research, I’ve identified that ‘leftover lamb curry’ would be a good search term to target. But can I do better? I would type in lots of variations of that keyword trying to find the best combination of words for that recipe. I could try ‘roast lamb leftovers curry’ or ‘curry with leftover lamb’ or ‘curried leftover lamb’. Alternatively, I could try and get a bit more specific: ‘leftover lamb korma’ or ‘leftover lamb jalfrezi’. Again, I would then check these ideas to find out which are the best in terms of highest search volumes / least competition.

I would use my ‘best’ keyword as my focus keyword and a selection of the other high-scoring keywords as secondary keywords.

I would also probably sprinkle in a few of those high volume / high competition keywords throughout my blog post… As I start ranking for my lower competition keywords, and assuming searchers click through and have a good ‘user experience’ (UX), so I will start to rank for the higher competition keywords too!

 

Step 6: Optimize your blog posts for search engines

It’s no good doing all that hard work if you then don’t use your keyword research properly in your blog posts. Put simply search engines won’t realize your blog post is the perfect answer to your ideal reader’s search query if you don’t play by the rules.

So how do you do that?

It’s very easy: ensure that your ‘focus’ keyword is in all the right places:

• Title
• URL (this is less important than it used to be)
• Meta (the bit in the Yoast SEO plugin that’s a short summary for search engine results)
• First paragraph
• At least one image ALT tag
• At least one H2 subheading
• Scattered a few times elsewhere (naturally) in the test of the text
• Anchor text in links from your other blog posts to this new one

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, this is very easy as the plugin will prompt you with its traffic light system to place your focus keyword in all of these places in your blog post.

 

Step 7: Give your keyword-optimized blog post a head start

Don’t forget to promote your new keyword-optimized blog post! This will speed up the process of getting your blog post moving up the rankings. Share it everywhere: social media, your email list, relevant Facebook groups, roundups… Use this post on ways to promote your blog posts to help you.

 

Step 8: Keep optimizing your posts!!

It’s no good doing this once. Things change: you change, your blog direction changes, your readers change… So keep on going through these steps coming up with fresh content ideas that you know your audience is searching for and doing micro keyword research to come up with the specific keywords for each blog post.

 

Keyword research and the real world

Does all this sound like a ridiculous amount of effort? I can assure you it’s not. Keyword research and SEO in general actually takes very little time once you get into the swing of things. In my experience keyword research takes far less time, effort and energy than social media and for far greater gain.

Want proof? I put in roughly the same amount of effort per week on social media and SEO (including keyword research)… over 85% of my traffic comes from search engines and less than 5% comes from social media. This is why I am so passionate about SEO and keyword research. When you learn to do it properly, it’s one of the best productivity tools out there: less work for so much more gain!

All I do is a little macro keyword research about once a quarter, when I am planning my next quarter’s content. This might take half a day, 4 times a year. And then I do about 5 minutes on micro keyword research before I start each post. That really is all you need to do.

 

Using keyword research to update old posts

One additional way to harness the power of keyword research is when you are updating old posts. When you are updating old posts, look for ways to improve them.

Do keyword research on the current focus keyword (if the old blog post has one!) as well as similar search terms. If you find one that is better than your existing focus keyword, then it’s quite OK to change your keyword. But bear in mind you will also need to change the keyword elsewhere in the post – for example the title, first paragraph, meta, alt tags, headings etc.

The one place you shouldn’t change the focus keyword is the URL, as this will mess up any backlinks you have to this post. Keep the URL the same, but it’s quite OK to change everything else.

The other thing you can do is beef up old content with new secondary keywords, dotted naturally throughout the text.

READ MORE >>> How to update an old blog post (and why you should!) + CHECKLIST

 

Common mistakes with keyword research

Mostly keyword research is a very positive thing for your blog. There are however a few mistakes you will need to avoid:

Keyword Stuffing

This was a technique employed ‘back in the day’ when ‘stuffing’ your blog full of keywords was the most effective way to get to the top of search results. This led to horrible articles, which didn’t help searchers at all, being top of the list. These days search engines are much more sophisticated and ‘user experience’ and ‘relevance’ are much more important. Stuffing your blog post full of keywords in an unnatural way will not help you, nor will it be a nice experience for your users. So drop keywords in naturally and don’t repeat them too much.

Targeting keywords which are too competitive

If Page 1 of the search results for your chosen keyword is full of big, powerful names in your niche, you are very unlikely to rank well for that keyword. By all means go for that competitive keyword as one of your secondary keywords, but target a less competitive long tail keyword for your main ‘focus’ keyword.

Overthinking it

Keyword research is not an exact science. You can do everything ‘right’ and for some reason you don’t rank. Or the opposite – I expect we’ve all got an old blog post in our back catalogue that seems to do amazingly well, despite not being optimized for SEO. Don’t worry too much – just keep working through the steps and little by little you will start to see more and more traffic coming from Google.

Dismissing keyword research as somehow artificial or false

As someone coming from a marketing background, this attitude baffles me! As far as I am concerned if you want your blog to do well the old rules of marketing still apply – find out what your target market wants and provide them with it where and how they want it. In the case of blog posts, find out what your readers want using keyword research and then ensure they can find it easily on search engines by optimizing your posts with keywords.

Dismissing keyword research because it takes too long

This is something of a false economy. Yes, it will take a little extra set up time in the short term, but long term you will experience much stronger, more reliable and less time consuming blog traffic, than if you rely on social media for your blog traffic.

Expecting it to work overnight

It won’t! Spending time on keyword research and optimizing blog posts for keywords will reap big rewards in the long term, but you might not see much difference immediately. When I started doing it for Easy Peasy Foodie, it took 3 months before I began to see any real results, and about 6 months before my traffic started soaring.

 

Want to take your SEO to the next level?

Then you need SEO Jumpstart!

SEO Jumpstart is a jargon-free, self-paced SEO course for bloggers like you who want to grow their blogs in a long-term, sustainable way and be free from worrying about getting traffic from social media! And SEO Jumpstart features a whole MODULE dedicated to exactly how to do keyword research, including a step-by-step video tutorial.

FIND OUT MORE >>>

 

ANY QUESTIONS?

I know keyword research and SEO in general can be a tad confusing! So please do feel free to ask any questions you have in the comments below.

 

 

More on this topic…

• KeySearch Review: Is KeySearch worth the cost? [2024]
• How to use KeySearch for keyword research: step-by-step tutorial [2024]
• How to get your website on the first page of Google
• 17 SEO mistakes to avoid in 2024
• FREE DIY SEO AUDIT

 

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