How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Blog—And Rank for Them
One of the little-known benefits of creating a blog is the ability to rank in the search engines for peripheral keywords (terms and phrases that are just outside your core keywords, but still highly relevant to your market). Many businesses focus their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts solely on ranking for terms that are aligned perfectly with their products or services, yet they overlook the opportunity to rank on additional keyword variations. Leveraging blog content is a very effective approach to target and rank on a broader portfolio of search engine keywords. By doing so, you can expand your reach and drive more qualified traffic and potential customers to your website.
To help you establish and execute an effective blogging strategy for SEO keyword targeting, here’s a three-step process to get your business blog up and running and ranking for bigger basket of keywords.
Step one: Identify your target keywords
In my opinion, a business should treat its blog as a valuable marketing asset, rather than a place to post aimless anecdotes and random thoughts, which is often the case. Used effectively, blogs have the power to reach new customer segments and grow your business. To harness to full power of blogging for SEO, you’ll need to adopt a serious, structured and disciplined strategy. This all starts with keyword research.
Ways to find keywords
Keyword research is a process to find keywords that will drive traffic to your website. If your site is already ranking well for your core product and service keywords, your aim should be to select additional keywords, which may be in the form of mid to long tail keywords, keyword variations or entirely new terms and phrases you’ve never thought of targeting.
To find these new keyword opportunities, you can use a range of different methods, such as:
- Keyword tools - There are a number of free keyword suggestion tools to help you discover new keywords. One of my favorites is Wordstream's Free Keyword Tool (NOTE: in the interest of full disclosure, this is my company’s tool. That said, it’s still an excellent free keyword resource). Say you sold organic baby products, for example. If you type that phrase into the Niche Finder, it suggests similar keywords to target, orders them by popularity and groups them semantically.
- Competitor websites - By examining the websites of your competitors, you can see which search terms other companies are ranking for in your niche and jot these competitive keywords down as potential blog post topics
- Google Trends - This is another great place to discover new keyword and content ideas, based on trending popularity and seasonality
- Web analytics - If you have analytics tracking software installed on your website, look at the keywords visitors used to find your website; pay particular attention to new keywords and variations of your core terms
Step two: Create your content
Once you’ve generated your list of new keyword opportunities, the next step in leveraging blog content for SEO rankings is to publish content that is topically-themed around these new keywords. To get started, you should block off some time to examine your list of new keywords and brainstorm some blog ideas for each. I would also recommend you create a content dashboard to house and manage your content ideas. To create a content dashboard, you can:
- First, organize all your new keywords in a spreadsheet and group them thematically. (NOTE: Wordstream's Free Keyword Tool in the above example does this for you and you can have the keyword groups sent to you in a CSV file.)
- Next, assign blog topic ideas to each term or groups of terms. For example, I’ve used the keyword suggestions from the organic baby products example and selected a topic for each basket of related keyword suggestions.
Your content dashboard will look like the spreadsheet in the above example. Having this dashboard will keep you more organized and allow you to connect your keyword research data with your topic ideas for more effective blog posts.
Finally, before you launch your blog, it’s a good idea to have at least three posts already written and ready to publish. That way, you’ll be ahead of the game and able to push out content on a scheduled basis, while getting into a routine of crafting new content.
Get links to your blog
We've established that the goal of your blog is to create content that will rank for your target keywords. In order to achieve this goal, you need to craft compelling blog posts that will attract links from other websites. Why are links important? Quantity and quality of inbound links to your site from other websites is one of the key ranking signals Google uses to determine where sites will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). Google views links from one site to another as an endorsement or a "vote." Sites with more, quality votes rank better in the SERPs. You can find more, in-depth information about the importance of links in these link building resources articles.
Link bait ideas
There are a host of tried and true themes/formulas in blogging that are very effective for attracting links knows as "link bait," which include:
- Reviews - Comparing and contrasting "X vs Y" product is a great way to reach people in the "browse" stage of the buying cycle
- Interviews - Conducting an interview with a thought leader or influential figure in your industry often attracts links, especially from the website of the person you’ve interviewed
- Guides - Writing authoritative guides on a subject is a powerful link bait technique
- Polls and Surveys - you can get two posts out of this one. First, create a questionnaire post, asking people to vote on a compelling topic. Then, publish the results in a separate post. The results often get picked up by online news publications.
- Lists - People love lists. Notice in the above organic baby products content dashboard example, I used list ideas like the "Top 10 BPA Free Organic Baby Bath Toys," and "8 Reasons Why Organic Skin Care Products are Best for Your Baby."
SEO blogging best practices
In addition to using proven topics and themes to create content that will rank for your target keywords, there are also formats and media features you can add to your blog posts that will increase the likelihood of acquiring links and coverage, such as:
- Video - Adding video from YouTube to your posts boosts viewership
- Images - Pictures help drive home your point and create a richer experience for readers; make sure to optimize the images too
- Comments - Enabling comments on your blog builds community, allows readers to have a voice and lets you communicate with your audience
Finally, it's important to further optimize your blog for SEO and for usability by adding categories to house and organize your content by topic. Also, be sure to employ conventional SEO methods of crafting title tags and meta description text snippets that incorporate your target keywords. These methods are effective for getting traditional Web pages to rank well and should always be applied to your blog posts too.
Step three: Market your blog
To get your content ranking well for your target keywords, the world must know that your content exists. You can’t acquire links and media coverage unless people are aware of your blog. This means once your posts are written, you’ll want to promote and share them with others. Here are a few strategies for promoting your blog to different channels and pulling new visitors to your content.
Methods to market your content
- Email signature - Have everyone in your company add a line in their signature that says "Check out our blog," with a link to your blog’s home page
- Company collateral - Add your blog URL on your business cards, company stationery and all promotional materials
- Current clients or newsletter subscribers - If you have an email list or you publish a newsletter, you’ve already got a captive audience. Tell them about your blog.
- Company home page - Make sure you add a section on your home page that promotes and links to your blog
- RSS feed - Give visitors the opportunity to subscribe to your blog posts using RSS
Media channels to target
- Press releases - Once you've launched your blog, send out a press release announcing it; you can also promote individual, noteworthy blog posts with press releases too. My favorite service is Marketwire.
- Social media - Create social media accounts and publicize new content with links to your posts. Setting up a Twitter company profile, LinkedIn groups and a company page on Facebook are all great ways to promote your content to a target audience. Also, be sure to make friends in these social networks and promote their content too and they will reciprocate.
- Comment on other blogs - Another great way to get exposure is to leave insightful comments on other industry blogs and include a link back to your blog. Say something intelligent and people will want to see what else you’ve got to say.
If you follow the methods and steps outlined in this article, you can create a powerful publishing tool that helps your business rank for variety of keywords and search queries. By creating compelling content and penetrating more search verticals, your blog posts will attract coverage and links around the web, drive potential customers to your website, leading to additional sales and conversion opportunities to foster growth for your business.
