Whether or not your page or post does well is determined far before it’s actually published. Before any of that becomes a reality, you need to do the proper keyword research and figure out what you need to be writing about in the first place. Without doing keyword research, you could end up wasting copious amounts of time creating content that nobody is going to be able to even find. Keyword research is necessary to figure out what keywords people are searching for.
How do you find these keywords?
There’s a variety of ways to find keywords – each of which will yield different results, so it’s good to explore different ones. Firstly, there are software tools, like Moz and SEMRush, that will give you keyword suggestions based on the keywords you provide to show you other similar queries people are searching. These tools also give data keywords like how many searches they get per month, how competitive they are, how much it costs to buy those keywords on Google Adwords, and many other metrics that can help you identify your target keywords. Another tool you can use to find some of this data is the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension that integrates with Google search engine results pages.
It’s helpful to leverage tools like these when doing keyword research, but oftentimes, they don’t tell the full story. There are many more specific, or long-tail, keywords that actually make up the majority of the search volume. For example, even though shoes might get thousands of searches per month, size 11 womens shoes, basketball shoes, and other specific queries about shoes get more searches. For that reason, it’s important to find these long-tail keywords for the maximum traffic opportunity.
1. Social Media Groups
Social media groups are a gold mine for finding keyword ideas. People are constantly discussing interesting ideas and talking about their experiences in these social media groups, particularly on Facebook. Check out these groups and see what the discussion is like. Oftentimes, people asking specific questions end up being perfect long-tail keywords to target.
2. Wikipedia
Another place to find niche topics related to your site is Wikipedia. Check out Wikipedia pages for topics your site covers and look at the navigation menu on the left-hand side of the page. Within the navigation window on a given Wikipedia page you can find more specific categories and topics pertaining to the page. These are perfect for discovering entirely new batches of long-tail keywords.
3. Forums
Like social media groups, forums are a great spot to find targeted discussion about specific topics. Many people write in on forums when they’re experiencing a problem, which leads to many questions being asked by the forum members – all of which are potential keyword opportunities!
4. Reddit
Reddit is similar to a forum, but it’s much more powerful. Reddit is known as the “front page of the internet” and attracts a lot of interesting discussion. From news and politics to taking proper care of betta fish, you can find a subreddit thread about virtually anything. Scroll through some subreddits related to your site and see what people are writing in about, what articles are being shared, and pick out what the common themes are to find out what keywords might be good to focus on.
Guest article written by: Brian from enlightened-digital.com
What an amazing post. You have shared such valuable information here in this post. Keywords are very important for search engine ranking and how well you have covered this topic. I haven’t tried Reddit as of yet. I guess It is time to try it now.
Thanks for sharing, keep up the good work. 🙂