Writing a blog, and ensuring it gets the traffic it deserves, requires careful keyword research and deployment. But what is this, why is it important, and how can you achieve it? Find out, here…
If you know anything about marketing, you’ll know that optimizing your article or website for SEO is one of the key ways you can boost traffic to your site. One of the greatest methods to do this is through utilizing keywords throughout your website and blog.
This may sound complicated and, if you’ve never heard about it before, could seem very strange. You wouldn’t be wrong there. Due to the way, search engines have evolved, it can be tricky to navigate the world of keyword use.
So, to help you through, here are some tricks of the trade that I’ve learned since becoming a copywriter. Specifically, I’m going to dive into how I go about keyword research efficiently and effectively…
Introduction to Keywords on Websites
Keywords are usually short phrases that people would naturally search for on Google, Bing, or the like. By littering your article, website, or blog with keywords throughout, you can better ensure your site comes up on search engine results, and attract new visitors.
This is one of the key elements of SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. Without this foundation to your written copy, you’ll have almost no chance of ranking on search engines. Below are some commonly searched phrases, which could be a good template to start with:
- How to…
- Tips for…
- Most common…
To discover more about why using keywords is so important for your blog or website, head on over to my article all about what I do for a living. Here, I not only discuss what I do as a career, but also the ins and outs of SEO, and why this is all so important for any website.
Choosing Blogpost Keywords When Writing a Blog
Now that you know the basics of why keywords are so important, let’s move on to some keyword research methodology. After all, by optimizing the process with which you choose keywords, you’ll be able to do so with ease in no time.
Before beginning anything, you need to choose your main keyword and your secondary keywords. The key to choosing your keywords is to get into the heads of your audience. The main thing is to think about trends within your business, and commonly asked questions that you think your clients want to answer.
To learn some of the specific methods I use for choosing my primary and secondary keywords, don’t go anywhere…
Choosing Your Main Keyword
Your main keyword is the word or phrase that goes in your title; the crux of your article or web page. Your title should be between 50 and 65 characters long, and your main keyword should be included, word for word, without being split up.
To choose a main keyword, I use Google Keywords or Ahrefs, and it’s mainly a trial-and-error job. With both of these mediums, I have a topic in mind and experiment with typing in certain related keywords to see how often they’re searched. If the keyword is searched a few thousand times each month, then this is a good one to choose.
Ahrefs is a little more comprehensive than anything else I’ve used, as it also provides you with a metric for Keyword Difficulty, out of 100. Through using this, you can better decide which keywords to use based on how often they’re searched each month, and how easy it’ll be to rank for them.
This strategy also works when choosing keywords for your social media and website.
When first starting your blog site, it’s important that your keywords have little competition, i.e. are searched less often. So, choosing keywords that get searched 100,000 times a month may not be a good starting point. By opting for lesser-searched words, your blog post is much more likely to end up on the first page of the search engines.
For example, the word “accounting” will have A LOT of competition, but something like “good accountant qualities” will most likely have less competition, so it’s a much better place to begin.
Once you’ve made good ground on these lesser-used keywords, Google will decide your posts are valuable. Then, in a few years, you can start having a go at beating the more competitive keywords.
Choosing Your Secondary Keywords
After this, you’ll also need to choose your secondary keywords, which should be implemented throughout your blog post. For this, you’ll need a keyword generator, which you usually have to pay for.
For this, I use a Chrome Add-On called Keywords Everywhere, which is one of the best free keyword research tools out there. This is a great tool to discover which other keywords you should use, to link to the main keyword.
For example, say our main keyword is “layout of your blogpost”. When we type this into Google, our Chrome Add-On shows us that the following keywords are great to use throughout your blogpost:
- blog post layout template
- blog layout best practices
- blogs
- best blog posts
- welcome blog post sample
- first blog posts of famous bloggers
- how to write a blog
- blog format template
Alternatively, you could just use your initiative, and choose words or phrases which you think people would search for often. As you can see above, a lot of the recommended secondary keywords are just extended versions of the main keyword. Get into the audience’s shoes, and decide what you think they’ll like to know best.
You should try and implement these keywords throughout the article or web page, using bold text to emphasize their whereabouts. The more you use these throughout, the better, as long as you don’t overdo it.
The most important thing with this is to ensure you add these keywords as naturally as possible. You can get a good idea of how to do this by checking out my article all about blog writing format.
Can You Use Multiple Main Keywords?
To add even more value to your blogpost, you could even use more than one main keyword in your blogpost! For every main keyword used, however, you must ensure:
- You include secondary keywords for both of your main keywords within your blogpost.
- Each of your main keywords is used at least once in your subheadings.
- Each of your main keywords is used at least once in your initial blog snippet, in bold at the top of the post.
My Tips for Dispensing Your Keywords Throughout Your Blog
So, how can you make sure as many of these keywords as possible feature in your blog? Here, I list an order of steps I usually take when writing a blog post:
- Start with a blog post template, including a heading with your primary keyword/s in it, a space for an intro, some advisory headings, and a conclusion.
- Use Keywords Everywhere, the SEO keyword research tool I discussed above, to obtain secondary keywords for the post. To do this, type your primary keywords into Google, and copy and paste the “Related Keywords” in the intro of my blog.
- I then use these keywords, and the “People Also Ask” section on Google, to advise my heading titles. This way, I can often dispense my keywords into the headings, and have a good structure for my blog laid out already.
- Then, I copy and paste the rest of the secondary keywords into the headings, where I think they’ll fit best.
Through doing all of this, I not only end up with a great structure to inform my writing, but I also ensure I don’t forget any keywords along the way. Obviously, if the keywords really don’t fit naturally, I miss them out. But, as long as I ensure to include as many secondary keywords as possible, as well as my own variations, this tends to do the trick.
Using Images to Help Optimise Your Blog
Your blog can also be optimized through the images you use throughout your post. You can do this through the use of keywords – pretty cool right? But how, exactly, is this possible?
Optimizing Images for SEO
Dealing with images within your blogpost or social media post is not as simple as copying and pasting. In fact, if you do this correctly then, when people type your key search terms into Google, your images can appear as the Google Image examples on the results page! Here’s a step-by-step guide for what to do with your images to achieve this:
Step-by-Step Image Use
- Save all the images you want to use on your computer. I usually choose landscape images, as these take up less space on the page when you’re scrolling through an article.
- Give them a relevant name, and organize them how you wish.
- Using an image resizer site, resize your images so they’re no larger than 55kb, and overwrite the original images with these ones.
- Insert the relevant images, from your computer, into the blog post.
- Depending on the length of the text, I usually put between 3 and 4 in there – one after the intro, one before the conclusion, and anywhere you see fit in between.
- Once you’ve done this, it’s time to add alt-txt to the image. This will depend on the interface you’re using but should require either an image title and a description, or just a description alone.
- For Google Docs, your alt-txt should be as follows:
- A title – this should be catchy.
- A description – must include the image title in there somewhere, and describe it in a fun and interesting way.
- For WordPress, we would just include the description part of this, as we don’t have the option to include a title.
- Your alt-text must be as natural as possible. The most effective way to do this is by implementing your blogpost’s main keyword within the description. Here is a great example of good alt-txt…
An Alt-Txt Example
Say our blogpost main keyword is “Blogging”, then our alt-txt could be as follows:
Title: A Desk With a Computer On
Description: This desk with a computer on it is the first step to start your blogging adventure
As you can see, I’ve included the title keyword in the description, word for word. What’s more, the description isn’t just a description of your image, it’s a natural sentence that includes your keyword.
Once published, when you hover over this image, our title shows up, which describes the image. The description element of the image, however, is just for Google’s use, which will help your blog post stand out on Google search terms.
Think You’re Ready to Start Your Keyword Research?
So, this is everything I know, so far, about using keywords to optimize your blog post or website. Through using these techniques, I can’t guarantee that your blog posts will rank in search engines. As I’m sure you know, there’s a lot more to it than just keywords.
That said, this is one of the greatest foundations of writing anything online to boost traffic to your website. In doing so, hopefully, you’ll be able to gain more visitors and, if you’re a business, some sales too! In time, if you keep at it, you should see results.
Have you got anything to add to my keyword research advice? I’d love to hear your comments down below about how you go about your keyword research. Or, if you’ve learned something new today, let me know! Thanks for reading.