How To Make Your Blog More Comprehensive Through Keyword Research

Keyword research is very important in the SEO game. Two of the most important search ranking factors are title tags and anchor text. However, these factors are useless unless you have relevant keywords. Relevant keywords should be in your title tags and anchor text so that you can rank highly and get more search traffic.

One benefit that I’ve noticed recently about keyword research is how it can make your blog more comprehensive. Oftentimes I find bloggers including myself getting into rut with about blog topics. We write about the same stuff without delving into other areas in our niche.

If I don’t do market research (which is what keyword research is), I find myself writing about what I like instead of what my market is searching for. It’s okay to write about our favorite topics. However, we should balance our blogs by also writing about the things our niche audience is thinking about. By doing this, we become a valuable resource and our monetization opportunities increase.

The key to good marketing is giving your audience what they want. Through keyword research, we can find out topics of interest within our niche that we’ve neglected.

Quick Example

Let’s look an example of this phenomenon. Let’s pretend I’ve started an SEO firm.

I’ve set up my website. I believe blogging is a great way to converse with my target audience, so I blog. I’ve written blog posts about keyword research, link building, and social media because in my mind, those are currently the most important aspects of SEO. Also, I like writing about those topics. However, if that’s all I blogged about, I would be missing out on profits and traffic.

So, I did some keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool.

I typed in seo, made sure the “Use synonyms” box was checked, and then clicked “Get Keyword Ideas”.

The keyword tool spit out a bunch of keywords. I clicked “Avg Search Volume” to organize the keywords by search volume.

After glancing at the top keywords, I quickly came up with new SEO topics.

One of the keywords was search engine marketing. This phrase isn’t used as much as search engine optimization in the SEO blogosphere. However, the keyword tool said both keywords got the same amount of search volume. Therefore, I’ll write a couple blog posts about how SEO can get a valuable tactic in any business’ marketing plan. Also, I’ll talk about the relationship between marketing and SEO.

Here are two other keywords that I would not have thought about unless I did keyword research: search engine placement and search engine positioning. You don’t hear search marketers use the words placement or positioning. I’ll start using those two words in my blog posts. Also, I write articles based on those keywords. For example, I’ll write an article about reasons why the top SEO firms don’t guarantee search engine placements.

Surprisingly, search engine submission was a highly searched term. Search experts agree that search engine submissions are not needed anymore. I need to write posts about this subject to educate my audience.

As you can see, based on my keyword research, I’ve learned more about my target audience. I can speak at their level better because I know what they are searching for. My SEO blog will be more comprehensive because instead of just writing posts about topics I like, I’ll also be posting about what my audience is interested in.

Your Turn

Try out my exercise. Go to Google’s Keyword Tool. Type in a broad keyword that relates with your niche and see if you can find topics that you have neglected. Realize that people are actually searching for these keywords. By writing posts about them, you’ll be filling a need in your niche.

If you do this exercise, I’d like to hear your comments on how it worked out for you.