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It is a common misconception for new bloggers that keyword research can be completed in a short amount of time and that the focus needs to be on writing.
In reality, it takes hours of careful analysis to find the best keywords for your niche site, business, or website. Keyword research is not something you should think about as an afterthought but rather how you should approach SEO from the start.
Keyword research can take 7+ days while developing a keyword strategy. You then gather up all the relevant details about keywords like their volume, competition, and trend analysis. A strategy must be created after conducting this type of research in order to grow organic traffic towards a site.
Keywords are how search tools, like Google, interpret a users search for information and it is how visitors are shown results through major search engine results pages what they were looking for on the web.
The more specific your targetted keywords are, the better your chance will be to rank higher and drive traffic to your niche site, blog, or business overall. If you’ve been working hard at content creation without thinking about how people might find it online then now is the time!
Here’s how I have learned to approach keyword research!
How Do I Do Thorough Keyword Planning Research?
I always spend at least the first week of any sites start looking for the best starter keywords, these are called “long tailed keywords” due to the amount of words contained in the base query.
Where many people may think of keywords like “ink pen” this is a short-tailed version and will be darn near impossible for a new website to rank high enough to get any real traffic from your writing efforts.
This is why targetting phrases like “what is different on an ink pen for left handed writers” can yield so much more chances to rank as you are getting very specific to a searchers intent.
Understand Your Current Status
For most fresh sites you will want to write on these, generally easier to rank content pieces, for at least 50-100 posts.
The intent being to become that site that ranks in position 1-3 for a wide range of keywords, building more topical relevancy than your competition.
You have no history, search engines will not know your quality and unless you can start building high quality user interactions. This is natural and unless you have a huge amount of free cash for purchasing links, you will need patience and to work hard to post content prior to seeing any significant growth.
Find Your Niche
For many this may be the easiest or the most difficult step on the path to keyword research and beginning to build the website. If you want help on walking through this process I have a guide here to make this as pain free as possible.
The niche will be the key to your entire keyword search, so understanding and being choosy here will help you know the directions you can go within research.
Many times I will write out niches while looking at them for viability even if I don’t build a site, take a look at them here.
Build Out List of Categories For Simple Silo Structure
Once you have chosen a niche or if you are reading ahead, I like to start at the niche level and look for key branches within the niche. For example a site on “pens and pencils” you could have categories for pencils, pens, markers, etc.
These can give you your first way to look into one of these categories to search for post options which we discuss below in more detail.
I try to find at least 3-6 of these categories at first and many times while doing research I will find unique categories which can sometimes yield amazing results.
Begin Assembling Keywords Based on Category
This is when I begin to use Google Sheets to start each project, I will start normally looking at ideas with tools like KeywordChef, AskSocrates, Answerthe Public, and then use those ideas to look at the SERP itself as they are long tail keywords finders.
I try to add at least 100-200 base ideas to my Google Sheet as that gives me a solid base to find 30-50 posts that I can start writing within the week and know that I can rank them and start getting visitors and traffic within months.
Once I have this list the time to mark each keywork, I never delete them from my sheet so there is always a way to go look later when I could compete.
Research Keywords Finding Viable Competitive Chances
The last part is the hardest for a new site owner if you are really new to blogging, understanding who is real competition and who is actually on topic can leave many newbies scratching their heads.
What you want to look for are lower competition sites, for many blogs this would be things like Quora, Reddit, Forums, nd similar content. Note though that just because it is a forum won’t always mean you can outran them.
These sites just expose the fact that there is less people overall competing for the keyword OR that the search intent is aimed towards having multiple opinions from multiple people and you want to distinguish this fact.
I try to rate the competition as Easy (short content and most the times forums or fully off topic from the keyword intent), medium (other blogs on the topic and aligned with searcch intent), and then difficult (sites that are definitive like healthline, wikipedia, and maybe niche spcific sites in some cases).
Then after I evaluate my entire list I will sort it by this “difficulty” and then I will begin writing from the easy moving forward to the difficult.
The difficult may never specifically rank but if I feel the visitors need it and I want to link to it I would rather link to my own content then send them off page to another site.
How Can You Do Keyword Research Quickly?
The simplest way is to learn to use tools like KeywordChef, since they are focused on providing you low competition keywords at low costs it can grossly increase your speed in finding keywords you can win outright.
Their plan comes with the first 1000 results free, then for a super small fee of $20 or more you get more searches and enable the SERP analyzer that tells you how many low competition options exist on page one!
This can help many be ready to build their first 30 to 50 posts in less than a day!
Final Thoughts on Keyword Research
If you’re looking for the quickest way to shorten keyword research time, then I would suggest you signup for KeywordChef today and find your first 1000 for free!
It’s an amazingly easy way to jump on the low-hanging fruit when it comes to keyword research as the tool was built by an affiliate marketer with the focus on creating a tool specific to new owners who need those low competition topics.
It is as simple as entering a seed set of keywords that relate to your niche or subject in general and you will be provided the chance to search for questions, .
Signing up is free so there really isn’t any risk involved—you have nothing to lose but everything to gain by trying out this amazing new SEO tool!
