How to Get Content Topic Ideas With Keyword Research
Written by Alexis Rodrigo
One of the biggest challenges of creating content is finding topics to write about. As with other forms of communication, it’s important to be sensitive to what your target audience wants.
In online content, the way to find out what your audience wants is keyword research. In this post, you’ll learn how to do keyword research using free online tools, as well as how to pick your keywords for specific online content.
What Keyword Research Is
First things first: what is keyword research? It is simply the process of finding out what keywords – words or phrases – Internet users are typing into Google and other search engines.
You can find both free and online tools that will tell you which keywords are being searched for online, and even how many times those words or phrases are being searched every day. Logically, the higher the number of searches, the greater the demand for that particular topic.
However, keyword research goes beyond finding high-traffic keywords. It also includes researching the competition – those sites which are ranking high in Google and other search engine results pages (SERP). Specifically, you want to know what those pages are doing to get on the good side of the search engines.
Once you find these keywords, you’ll have a good list of topics to create content for.
How to Do Keyword Research Using Free Tools
Step 1. Find high-traffic keywords
The first step is to find high-traffic keywords, or those words and phrases that get searched numerous times a day. For online content, you’ll want a minimum of about 20 searches per day.
Two free tools you can use are Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool. Both are free and will give you both a list of related keywords, as well as the number of searches each one receives. Some marketers aren’t keen on using Google’s tools for whatever reasons, so let’s use Wordtracker for now.
Simply type in your general topic in the keyword suggestion tool and then click “Hit Me,” like this:
After I typed “blogging,” Wordtracker gave me 100 related keywords. Of these, 24 have at least 20 searches every day. Go over the list and choose the ones that are related to your niche or market. You may want to type these keywords into a spreadsheet or table.
Step 2. Check the competition.
You can do this going to Google and typing the keyword into the search box. Using the example above, Googling “explain blogging” gave me these results:
Now look at the top 3 web pages that appear in the search results. If you have more time, you may want to check out the first 10 results.
Look at:
- How well the page is optimized for the keyword or keyword phrase
Click on the page link and skim through it. Does the phrase appear on the page URL, title and content in exactly the same way you typed it? In our example, the first 3 results do have the exact phrase in their content. However, the second result does not have “explain blogging” in its title.
- The relevance of the page to the keyword phrase
In the example above, the searcher is most likely looking for a simple explanation of blogging. None of the top 3 results do this.
- How many pages are linking back to the page
To do this, go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. Type the URL of the page in the “Explore URL” box. Under results, click on “Inlinks” and select “Except from this domain.” Look at the results I got after I did this for the first result in my SERP:
The resulting list includes all the web page that link back to the page you’re exploring. The higher the number of links, the tougher your competition. The results above show that my number 1 competition in Google has 61 web pages linking back to it.
You’ll also want to look at each of the pages linking back to the page in question and see if the keyword is in the anchor text to the page. The anchor text is the word or words that are hyperlinked back to your competitor’s page. If the anchor texts don’t contain your target keyword, then those aren’t strong links. Again, the higher the number of links and the more anchor texts that contain the keyword, then the tougher your competition.
You may want to make a scoring system to give each competitor’s page a score that reflects how tough of a competitor it is.
But what about the number of competing pages? Most keyword research tutorials will tell you to look for keywords with few resulting pages in the SERPs, say 100,000 or below. However, this is an inaccurate measure of the competition. Even if the number of results is low, the competition can still be tough if the top results are highly optimized, high PR sites.
In fact you’re only competing with those pages that are on page one of the SERP, because most web surfers don’t bother to look beyond that. The first result gets most of the clicks from the SERP and each succeeding one gets fewer and fewer clicks. So you’re really only competing with the pages that are on the top 3 or so of the SERP.
Step 3. Organize your target keywords
At this point, you have a list of high-traffic keywords and an indication of the degree of competition for each. Now, group your keywords into high-competition and low-competition keywords.
Use the high-competition keywords for content you’ll be distributing in high PR sites, such as Ezinearticles.com, YouTube, Squidoo and Hub Pages. These web 2.0 properties are high-authority sites, so your content is likely to do well despite the tough competition. It will take time and you’ll probably have to do some promoting. But getting your content in these sites to rank high is still possible.
Use the low-competition keywords to create content for your own site or blog. Make sure you can build more backlinks to your content than what your competitors have. And follow the basic search engine optimization strategies to give your content the best chance of ranking high on SERPs.
There you have it, a list of keywords for your online content. Use this process and you’ll have a goldmine of content topics for many months to come.
How Do You Use Keywords?
Now it’s you turn to share: how do you use keywords? And do you do keyword research differently than I described above? Please share in the comments below.
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Visit Lexi Rodrigo Online at: TheSavvyFreelancer.com
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