When Im writing or recording an article or blog for my website, it always starts with keyword research.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analysing the actual search terms that your audience will be entering into the search engine such as Google. By ddoing this you gain insight which helps to direct you as to the information your audeince is looking for.
Why Do We Bother With Keyword Research
The bottom line is that we are looking and wanting traffic to our websites, and when you ahve no budget for advertising, we have to come up with another way to attract our audience. So keyword research tells me what topics are interesting to my audience. Looking at those keywords that are getting high volumes, I can decide what new content Im going to make. I can see those interesting topics and that gives me a starting point because Im not looking for the popular keywords, Im looking for low hanging fruit! The keywords that are not so popular, yes they have people searching for them but not as much as the high hanging fruit which for me are out of reach…. they are being targeted by big businesses.. Now that probably surprised you.. why wouldn’t I be wanting to target those keywords that are going to bring me lots and lots of people to my site..
The answer is simple….. To get that level of traffic you need to be on the first page of Google and the only way I can compete with big businesses that achieve that, is to pay the same as they do for their advertising to get on the first page of Google. I don’t have their advertising budget.
LOW HANGING FRUIT
What exactly does this mean? In business term that is used for the easy-to-do jobs, the easy-to-solve problems. It refers to tasks taht are inconsequential to larger challenges…. well thats the thing.. big businesses with large budgets are going to go after the high hanging fruit – with thousands of hits a day… Good for them is what I say, but that isn’t my business. I dont have much of an advertising budget so I can’t compete with the big guys who will be targeting those most popular keywords.
They can afford to pay for a place on the first page of Google and yes they will get a huge chunk of the market using those particular keywords, but that does not mean you won’t get traffic. I will show you that you will and you’ll be doing this with all your articles, so stacking the deck in your favour.
So How Do You Do Keyword Research?
So Im going to do a case study, so you can see exactly how its done, what steps you need to take and how far you need to go with it to get those great keywords..
Ok so the first thing to do is decide what your article might be about…. I think my audience might be interested in a side hustle… so lets put that into Google and see what comes up…..
As I expected from my Google search, page 1 on Google for these keywords is a paid advert – their budget will be massive and I can’t compete so Im not really interested in what they have for their headline in only so much as I need to stay clear of it.
The article below – ‘ 50 Ideas For A Lucrative Side Hustle’ is a good choice, the addition of a number into the headline is a good move, it will attract an audience. But Im particularly interested in the ‘People Also Ask...’ section
‘People Always Ask’
Says it all really, these are things that your audience are asking, looking for answers to their questions. They are usually slightly different to what your might be researching and are definiteily what we want to see. Your actual audience telling you what to write about.
So I took one of the titles from the ‘People Also Ask’ and put that into Google…Just to see what it would bring up and whether there would be any further suggestions..I put in ‘What Is A Good Side Hustle?’… So now I have more keywords to use in the next phase of Keyword Research …
More keywords to use when we move to the next stage of keyword research……
Keyword Research Tool
Jaaxy is my keyword tool of choice, offering a huge insight to the online blogger and infopreneur, taking so much of the timewasting out of finding those perfect keywords.
I’m going to show the keyword research for ‘What Is A Good Side Hustle?’ here but if you want to know more about Jaaxy, go read my article here which explains Jaaxy in detail – What is Jaaxy? A Keyword Tool.
You can have a free account with Jaaxy which will give you 30 free searches a month – TRY IT FOR FREE!
One thing I would like to clear up here about keywords is that you dont have to have just one keyword, you can have a string of them.. all duly check through Jaaxy of course – but not only that, you can put the keyword string into the middle of the headline and you will still rank for the keywords.
So for example you might have ‘great side hustles’ which would be an ideal headline. Its included all the keywords but it doesnt really pack a punch, but if you put in ‘10 Great Side Hustles For Beginners‘ – a much snappier headline.
Keyword Research – Getting Down To It.
Using the keywords that we have found in Google, I then go over to Jaaxy and put them into the keyword finder to see what the traffic is like.
Im not going to go into detail about Jaaxy here, as I have already written a detailed article about it which the link above will take you to.
The search in Jaaxy has brought up several interesting headlines to use…
So looking at the first headline – ‘What Is A Good Side Hustle’ comes up well.. its got reasonable traffic and 50 websites competing for the same keywords which isnt too bad. If you go further down, ‘A Good Side Hustle’ has 201 competing websites, thats way too many for me….
Let’s take a quick look at some high flying keywords…..
You can see here that it would be great to use ‘side hustle’ an awesome keyword to use, with 6893 people searching for it, but there are 214 other websites using that exact keyword, so unless Im going to pay for that keyword to get to the first page of Google, there is no point me using it as I will not achieve the first page naturally.
But looking at this screen shot from the first Jaaxy search, we have three that would be suitable – all three are worth pursuing….
This result is from using ‘What Is A Good Side Hustle To Make Money’ .. more keywords to try into Jaaxy…
And as you can see from this second search, using ‘Is Blogging A Good Side Hustle’ it shows up the same questions… so we have reached a conclusiong with these….
Lets take them back to Jaaxy and see what it says about them….
‘What Is A Good Side Hustle?’
There are some really good headlines to use here-
What Is A Good Side Hustle To Make Money?
Is Blogging A Good Side Hustle?
What Is A Good Side Business?
What Is A Good Side Job?
How Do I Make An Extra $1000 A Month?
Great headlines here too to choose from….
How Can I Make An Extra 1000 A Month?
How To Make An Extra £1500 A Month?
How To Make An Extra 300 A Month?
These check have brought up several potential headlines for several different styled artiles on side hustles. I wold not suggest doing them all, but possibly two or three, spacing them out over a few months to get the benefit of your audience.. but even now there are few tweaks you can use to pep them up to reel your audience.
Slight alterations such as : 10 Ways To Make an Extra $1000 A Month… or What Is A Killer Side Hustle To Make Money? By changing an odd word up to be more attractive doesn’t change your research metrics.
You can see from the screenshot below that by having different words in the keyword string, that you bring in another stream of visitors to your website…. The bold words are the keywords, with the lighter words being those that are dispensible
One thing to remember…… Make sure your keyword string for your headline makes sense… when you search sometimes in Jaaxy you get keywords that don’t make sense that look like they are great to use, but this is not the case. Google will punish headlines that don’t make sense.
CONCLUSION
Following the process of checking the keywords through Jaaxy and on Google, we know now that we have a selection of headlines that will be popular with our audience and bring traffic to the website. This will take time but if you perform this every time you write an article, you will build up a strong website that will attract your audience and bring success to uour blogging business.
I seldom pass up an opportunity to read about Keyword searching. This is such an important part of our building our business. It is easy, just like building a business, but must be done. The ideas we have on our own are often just what people are looking for, just worded differently. We all grew up in different times and places and often use a different word to mean the same thing.
Your instructions are so thorough and complete that any question about what you are doing and why is explained. Knowing what people are actually looking for and what words they are using to search gives you so much advantage to work with for content on one’s site. This kind of article will assist anyone who reads it and takes a minute to study it will know more about how to have a better article. Thanks for the share, Sami
I can’t thank the author enough for coming up with the article. Proper keywords search is so essential to locate the right kind of content that you are looking for on the web. And because the content on the internet is infinite, browsing through so many pieces can become a cumbersome task. But now that I know how to do the right kind of keyword search associated with the kind of content that I am looking for, find the best available pieces have become so easy. This article is definitely a must-read. Thanking you.
Hey, WOW! Love this information. Your article is really helpful, I know a little about keyword research such as that they should make sense and to aim for low competition words but before this I didn’t really know that you can change a few words around. I was kinda scared of changing words around incase it effected being ranked but now that you have made that clear I’m definitely going to be taking your advice. Thanks
Pleased that this was of help to you!
Hello There
A very well put together article. You covered all the aspects of keyword search, how to do it and where to do it. The understanding of low hanging keywords are very important, many don’t know of this. Very informative article without making it too lengthy to read. You incorporate just the right about of imaging to help with your explanations. Over all a very good article. Well done
Thankyou Felicity, just what I was heading for, not to complicate a straight forward topic.
Great article. I recently started a website and I struggle finding the right keywords. The tip about changing up an odd word is really helpful. I tend to completely change my search in Jaaxy instead of trying that. In the future I’ll try adding numbers and adjectives to find the low hanging fruit.
Yes dont change things in your search, only a word or two but keep the same thread, if you find yourself changing completely then write down what you have changed to, to use as your next search.
Hi Helen,
Thanks for this guide on keyword research. I also find the “people also ask” section very useful for finding out what people are searching for online. What do you think about the alphabet soup method of keyword research? This is something I use a lot, and can get a big list of keywords that lasts me months.
Well written blog about keyword search, I wish I had seen this blog when I had started. If you are new to blogging this blog had summarized many majors keys for you to be successful. It took me a wild to understand the concept of keyword search, but once I understand I was able to be more fluent in writing my blog. I started to learn about jaaxy thank you for your information. Simply put it keyword search helps with your traffic or exposure.
Hello there, thank you for this very detailed an informative post on “ho to do a keyword reserch with google” I must say this I really timely for me because I’m currently building/working on my site and it’s very important I arm my self with the necessary tool that i’ll need to get the required traffic when my site really starts functioning.
Hey nice article you have there, your thoughts are indeed invaluable. It is a clear fact that an appropriate key word will definitely attracts more traffic to a website. Sometimes it is preferable to use terms like “How”, beacuse must online users wants to know how things are done, how to use a product, how to be faithful to their partners, how to start up a profitable business. The right keywords is indeed a vital tool in driving traffic’s to a website