Keyword Research For SEO: Keyword Planning Steps For Bloggers

Good? Please share

Keyword research for SEO is perhaps the most crucial task a blogger must be sure to get right before any writing can begin. Getting this wrong will give your blog article no chance for success.

There are keyword planning steps to writing a blog article that will attract traffic. If you get it wrong, your effort will amount to nothing. The more reason why this guide is a must-read for you.

Getting this right will cause your blog to do well, even among fierce competition.

In this how to do keyword research in SEO report, I will share core keyword research in SEO factors that you must observe when planning to write your next blog article.

Watch how to carry out thorough keyword research with Ubersuggest. At least, 20k blog visitor is guaranteed using this method.

Keyword planning

A keyword is a focus word(or group of words) that best represents the information on your website or article.

It is the search keyword for which specific webpages should rank.

So, your targeted audience should be able to find that page on your website when they use that particular keyword or phrase in search engines.

Now you know how important the understanding of keywords and keyword planning is to the success of your web pages.

One common mistake inexperienced bloggers make is writing blog articles based on assumptions.

When it comes to blog writing, you must carry out thorough keyword research using trusted keyword research SEO tools before you take the step to start writing.

It all begins with keyword planning.

Keyword planning involves obtaining keyword data, metrics, and forecasts and looking for new keywords to include in your writing project.

It begins with getting yourself good keyword research SEO tools that you feel most comfortable with.

You must understand how such tools interpret core keyword data and metrics.

Keyword core data

Some principal keyword data that great keyword research SEO tools do provide are;

The keyword volume search on either a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis
Cost per click (CPCs) of your keywords
SEO ranking difficulties
Competition for such a keyword and other important metrics.

These are crucial benchmarks that will inform your decision and help you decide your goals and expected outcomes, even before you write down a word.

Keyword research for SEO

Keyword planning come under keyword research for SEO, but keyword research in SEO contains much more.

Some steps to achieving excellent keyword research include understanding some of the following;

Keyword research SEO tools

In Keyword research for SEO, it is important that you make up your mind about which keyword research SEO tools you need to use.

You will have to choose your preferred keyword research tool.

There are a couple of great tools available online. Check this link for assistance, I shared 9 great SEO tools that you can choose from.

Bear in mind that you need to stay with your choice of keyword research SEO tools and understand how it works.

You also want to decide if you will go for the free tools, premium tools, or even a combination of both types.

Keyword to search

In mastering keyword research for SEO, you want to dig deep to find a perfect seed keyword from which you hope to arrive at your best keyword choices for an article.

Such a seed keyword is known as the Keyword to search.

How do you arrive at knowing the keyword to search in keyword research for SEO?

It will always come from topics that are generating the biggest buzz in your blogging niche/market.

A great way to identify these ‘buzzing’ topics is to research your competitor’s website. I mean the biggest players(websites) in your niche. I explained this concept in more depth in the attached video above.

In keyword research for SEO, the keyword to search will also come from the understanding of your niche’s pain points and interests.

This is another important source of keywords that you want to take seriously.

Knowing what followers in your focus niche are talking about is a great way to determine the keywords to create content around.

Keyword longtail tips

In carrying out thorough keyword research for SEO, an error you must avoid is to focus your attention on only one or two-word competitive keywords.

Except if your website has a high domain authority, you don’t want to enter into avoidable competition with the already established blogs and websites in your niche.

This is why you want to stay away from many of the short competitive keywords that several of these top blogs are already ranking for.

For example, consider the keyword “Digital Marketing”

From the SEO difficulty metric above, you can see how difficult it will be to rank for such a keyword. “Digital Marketing” is an example of a short competitive keyword that you may want to avoid.

You might not be in the Digital marketing space, but every niche has its own short keywords which can be so difficult to rank for or even create great content around.

The good thing about keyword research is that it will help you identify sub-topics under these more competitive keywords that you have a much better chances to rank for.

Watch out for topics that contain longer words (long tail keywords).

These are the keyword longtail topics, you will discover a lot of them that generate a high search volume with very minimal competition.

The ‘digital marketing’ keyword example

In the image above, “Digital Marketing” alone has a search difficulty of 82/100, though with about 673,000 monthly views.

With such an SEO difficulty score, it is way too high a competition keyword for an emerging blog with low authority that publishes digital marketing content.

If you scroll down a bit more carefully, you will discover some keyword longtail terms which also command a good search volume with much less competition.

A good example of such a keyword longtail term is “Digital marketing examples” with almost 10,000 monthly searches and a reduced competition score of 61/100.

If you drill deeper, you will find more keyword longtail terms with even lower SEO difficulty scores.

These longtail keywords with low SEO competition will give your blog a higher chance to rank on organic search results.

Saturated niches/keywords

Simply put, a saturated niche is a blog niche that has lots of keywords with very high SEO difficulties without corresponding sub-keywords with appreciable search volumes coupled with low SEO competition scores.

I already explained these concepts above.

So if you are a new blogger, you want to avoid saturated niches. But the only way you can determine this is to carry out thorough keyword research and interpret your metrics accordingly.

Keyword generators

Keyword generators are tools that offer keyword recommendations for use while preparing your SEO campaigns.

SEO keyword generators should play a significant role in your PPC and SEO keyword research strategy because basing your search marketing efforts on brainstorming and educated guesswork is a surefire method to ruin your results.

Many keyword research tools will offer a dual function of providing you with SEO metrics and keyword generator functions just as you can see below.

Here, my keyword to search is “Thanksgiving recipes”, but this keyword research tool has also generated related thanksgiving recipes keyword suggestions that I can consider.

SEO keyword research tools

Finally, I will end this article by listing a few SEO keyword research tools that you can begin to use immediately for your SEO research.

As you can guess, some are completely free SEO keyword research tools and other are freemium. This means that some of their features are free to use but you might have to upgrade to have complete access to them.

Free SEO keyword generators

Feel free to use any of these free keyword generators to have vast options when picking ideas for blog article keywords. All of these keyword generators are free to use and they are of inestimable value.

1. Search suggestions from Google

2. Google trends

3. AnswerThePublic

4. Google suggest

5. Google keyword planner

Keyword research tools

Once you have done a good job gathering keywords from these keyword generators, you will proceed into full keyword research to sieve through them and pick the most profitable ones.

The profitability of your keywords will depend on the metrics we have already discussed.

1. Ubersuggest

2. H-supertools

3. Wordstream

4. Kwfinder

Surely, there are several other great keyword research tools out there, but the ones I have listed are either free or have free options for you if you either want to test them out or you are on a tight budget.

You can use the keyword generator tool to generate a list of keywords in your blog niche.

Once you have a list, then go ahead and use the keyword research tools to further generate metrics for these keywords to know your chances with them.

The following are the important metrics that you want to take note of.

I have also listed them based on their order of importance in my personal opinion.

Search volume

This is the estimated volume of searches that a keyword gets in a given month.

SEO difficulty

SEO difficulty is an estimate of the competition that a keyword gets in organic search. The higher the number, the more competitive the keyword.

Cost Per Click(CPC)

This is the cost per click if you want to pay Google to be seen as an ad. Usually, the higher the CPC, the more profitable the keyword

There could be other data to take note of, especially if you are diving deeper into SEO training. But these are basically what you need to pay attention to while sieving out your SEO keywords.

Conclusion: Keyword Planning Steps For Bloggers

Keyword research in SEO is your first point of call if you want to write blog articles that will go viral and attract traffic to your blog or website.

Keyword research begins with keyword planning. It allows you to take note of crucial data and metrics. These metrics suggest the chances of success or failure of the topic you plan to write about.

This takes you to full-blown keyword research in SEO. Here, you should use keyword research tools that you are most comfortable with.

These tools will help you to determine important metrics such as search volume, competition, CPC, and other important data that guide you to pick your main topic and generate sub keywords that help your article rank higher than your competitors.

This single exercise will determine the success or failure of your blog article. If you get these steps wrong, nothing else you do to improve your blog result will matter.

Is there anything I missed in this hands-on report that will help a blog article to do even better? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.