Blogging has now transformed into an essential inbound marketing tactic for businesses of all sizes. Internet users are increasingly searching for businesses that provide them with content that educates or solves a problem. This is exactly what blogging is all about – educating users with the long term goal of getting them to purchase your products or services.
In addition to users searching for businesses with informative content, search engines also give more importance to blog posts that prompt user engagement.
Keyword Research Is the Key to SEO
Even though keyword research seems like common sense, many businesses ignore keyword research when it comes to blogging. The purpose of blogging in the first place is to keep attracting more readers to your blog by delivering relevant content on a regular basis.
You’re not just trying to attract just any old type of visitor. You have a specific group of visitors in mind when creating your blog posts, and there is no better way to attract that targeted group of visitors than by using their most commonly searched keywords in your blog posts.
Blog About What People Are Searching For
Blogging for the purpose of attracting and converting new clients is not a new concept; nevertheless, it’s an inbound marketing technique that requires keyword research in order for it to be effective.
The first thing you need to understand must be who your targeted customers are and where they are coming from. When you’ve identified this, then you can start to develop a root list of keywords and key phrases to use with in your blog writing. You might also want to identify trending topics potential customers are likely to type into the search engines and use them in your blog posts as well. Tools like BuzzSumo can be good for this.
Blogging is perhaps the very best content marketing tactic for all business owners, not only to promote their products and/or services but also to build niche authority. For example, if you are selling search engine optimization services in Minneapolis, you want to rank for terms similar to Minneapolis SEO. Using the right keywords with your posts greatly increases the chance you can rank for commonly searched terms, provided you use the words naturally and do not keyword stuff them into your site. With consistent blogging, you can easily establish your expertise with your audience over time.
Getting started with Keyword Research
If you have not yet worked keyword research into your blogging routine, the reason is probably because you don’t know exactly how to get started. Or you may feel its too complex and you feel overwhelmed by the thought of developing a list of keyword targets.
Its not as hard as you might think. In fact, with the many keywords research tools available in the marketing, you can whip up a keyword list in no time. As mentioned earlier, what you need to do on your part is to know exactly who your target audience is. And this is not difficult, because you already know your niche and how to parse it out into groups.
What you need to do is to identify a particular segment of that your niche and focus on attracting them to your blog. For example, if your niche is “dog training”, you can further narrow it down to “dog training for bulldogs”.
By refining your list, you can develop content buckets and start to use this information to form a content calendar for several weeks out, or even the entire year.
Perhaps the best keyword tool on the market is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. It has everything you need to do keyword research, and its free.
