Let’s get advanced.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to find low-competition keywords and related terms to optimize your posts.
I’m sharing my exact process and posting my notes here so you can follow along and shadow my steps.
I’ll get to the keyword research process in just a moment, but first, an important note for all bloggers…
Always do keyword research before you write
If you’ve already written your post, you can only find keywords that match the topic you’ve selected. During your keyword research, you’ll most likely find better keywords that would require a rewrite or a whole new post to target.
In other words, doing keyword research after writing a post will make you regret the post you wrote.
How to do keyword research for a blog post
Keyword research is a process of discovery, so it can be creative and messy, but the general process can be broken down into four steps:
- Brainstorm seed keywords
- Research your topic
- Select a primary keyword
- Collect related keywords
You’ll start by brainstorming some keyword ideas to begin your research. Then, you’ll use a keyword research tool to learn more about the terms people are using to search for your content. Lastly, you’ll create a list of keywords to target and select one as your primary keyword.
I’m going to perform keyword research “live” as I write this post so you can see exactly how I do it. For my example, I am planning to write a recipe for roasting potatoes and my site doesn’t rank that well yet.
Let’s begin with brainstorming.
Brainstorm seed keywords
The first step is to write down a few potential keywords for your post.
Here are the keywords I came up with for my example blog post:
- Roasted potatoes recipe
- Recipe for roasted potatoes
- Oven roasted potatoes
- How to cook potatoes in oven
- Roast potatoes recipe
They’re basically different ways of saying the same thing. When brainstorming, try to swap out words for synonyms to find out which terms are more popular in your niche.
For example, I’m guessing that “recipe” is a lot more common than “how to cook,” but I should check and make sure.
Along those lines, as you perform keyword research repeatedly in the same niche, you will collect an immense number of insights about the terminology they prefer to use and what they’re looking for.
Next, you’re going to bulk research these keywords to find out which keywords and terms are more popular.
Tip: When writing down your seed keywords, it’s best to avoid using modifiers. For instance, don’t include terms like best, cheap, or free. Start with only root keywords and you can add modifiers later in the process.
Topic research
Throughout this tutorial, I’ll be using SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool. If you’re blogging on a budget, Keyword Explorer is a cheaper alternative and Ubersuggest has a free plan.
Now that you have a few keyword ideas, you can begin your topic research.
During this step, you’re not looking to select a keyword just yet. Instead, you’re gathering insights and inferences about your audience that will help you write the article they want.
As I mentioned previously, this is not a straightforward process but I’m going to “talk out loud” in this post so you can see exactly how I do it.
Inside SEMRush, open the Keyword Overview menu and you’ll find a bulk input field for your keywords. Copy and paste your keywords into the input.
Once your keywords are entered, click the Analyze button and you’ll get the search volume and keyword difficulty metrics for each keyword.
There’s a lot we can learn from this already.
For starters, I was surprised that the keyword with “oven” in it was more popular than the “recipe” keywords, but then I realized it wasn’t a fair comparison. I needed a recipe keyword including “oven” and I should have added “roasted potatoes” as a standalone keyword, so I included those terms and repeated the search to get these results:
Here’s what I inferred from these initial results.
First, people search for “roasted potatoes” 6x more than “roasted potatoes recipe.” While terms with fewer words always get more search volume, the gap is wide enough that it could mean there’s a lot more people want to know about roasted potatoes than just a recipe.
I can also see that the phrase “oven roasted” is, in fact, less popular than “roasted.” This made me wonder if there was a more popular method of roasting potatoes, so I began a new search in Google to find out. Here’s what came up in the suggestions:
Aha!
It looks like people are also using air fryers, grills, and stovetops to roast potatoes, so let’s add all those variations to the Keyword Overview tool.
Now I can see that the “oven” keywords have much more volume with and without “recipe,” so I know that roasting potatoes in the oven is by far the most popular technique.
I can also see that the terms using alternative methods to roast potatoes have lower keyword difficulty scores, so they might be better terms for me to target.
My example website is relatively new and struggling to rank well, so the “air fryer” variation is really appealing to me.
SEMRush says the KD score is 58, so let’s check what that level of competition looks like by searching for the keyword in Google.
Yikes! Looks like I’ll have to dig a lot deeper. Some of the major players are ranking well for this keyword, so I have no shot at ranking in the top 1-3 anytime soon.
Now that I understand the landscape of this topic, I’m ready to dig deeper and choose my primary keyword.
What I’ve learned so far
With a little bit of preliminary research, I rapidly learned a few things about my topic:
- Using the oven is by far the most popular way to roast potatoes
- I won’t be able to rank well for this query unless I get a lot more specific
- More people search for “recipe” than “how to cook”
Based on these findings, I’m going to have to find a much more particular keyword if I want to rank well. This means that I should avoid publishing a basic roasted potatoes recipe.
As for what exactly I should write about, I still need to do more keyword research to figure that out.
Choose a primary keyword
Every page on your website needs to target one keyword in particular. This keyword is a perfect match for the topic of your post, and you’ll optimize your post primarily for this search phrase.
In the Keyword Overview page, you can click on one of your seed keywords to reach the full overview results.
“Roasted potatoes” has the most volume and is the most general term, so it will give me the widest insight into what people are searching for.
Checking the full Keyword Overview page, I can see immediately what kind of things people are searching for.
On the left are the Keyword Variations. I can see that people are interested in specific types of potatoes like red and sweet potatoes. Using one of these variations could be a great way to escape the competition.
In the middle, I can see the Questions. The keywords here confirm that most people searching for “roasted potatoes” are looking for a recipe, but there is a simple question of “how long” to roast them as well.
On the right, I can see the Related Keywords, and that’s where I’ll find out if people are looking for other things like tools for cooking potatoes or similar dishes.
There are tens of thousands of suggestions from SEMRush, so I’m not going to laboriously dig through them all. Besides, I already have a good idea of what I’m looking for: a more specific recipe with a lower keyword difficulty score.
Scrolling through the Keyword Variations, I found exactly that:
The 36 KD score is among the lowest I’ve seen and the volume is still huge at 2,400.
To learn more about this keyword, I clicked on it to reach its overview page, and that’s where I found some even lower competition keywords:
Finally, I’ve found a low-competition keyword that my site can rank for.
21 is a really low keyword competition score, so I did a quick Google search to confirm if it was actually that uncompetitive.
Now that’s what I’m looking for!
There are no major players like Delish or Food Network, and the first three results don’t even have a single review yet. This is a keyword I can rank for.
As for search volume, 40 is plenty. Believe it or not, when keyword tools repeat volume like that, your article will get way more traffic if it ranks #1. You can expect anywhere from 10-100x as much traffic for a first-place ranking (400-4,000 visitors/month for this keyword).
When I first set out on my keyword research, I knew I wanted to do a recipe about roasted potatoes and this salad recipe isn’t what I had in mind, but since I’m flexible, I was able to find a recipe that I can create and actually rank for in Google.
And this is why you always do keyword research before you write your post.
If I had already written a recipe on oven-roasted potatoes, what would I have learned? That this post will never rank for its keyword.
Instead, I did my keyword research first and now I have a much more interesting dish to create a recipe for and I know that it’s going to send me a lot of traffic because it’s a term I can rank well for.
At this stage, my primary keyword is selected, so it’s time to assemble a list of related keywords.
Create a list of related keywords
With the primary keyword selected, the topic of the post is set: it’s going to be a recipe for a roasted sweet potato and brussel sprout salad.
Now it’s time to learn more about this particular keyword so I can figure out what people expect to find as well as a few keyword variations I should include in my post.
I can use SEMRush again, I can use the search bar to get to the Keyword Overview page for this keyword.
As you can see, with a longtail keyword like this, there are not thousands of variations and related keywords. This is where our knowledge of the topic comes in handy.
This keyword is already so long that I’m not going to find suggestions that include “oven roasted” or “air fryer.” However, I already know that most people expect to use the oven to roast their potatoes, so that’s what I should do in my recipe.
Should every post target a keyword?
If possible, yes. Every post you write should target a keyword.
If you want to maximize your traffic, you should carry out the keyword research process above to find the keywords that will send you the most traffic.
That said, it’s your blog and you can do whatever you want. Maybe you love carrot cake and want to write a traditional recipe on baking one even though you’re unlikely to rank well for it.
Or maybe you’ve had a lot of regular readers request a particular topic that doesn’t seem to get much search volume. In that case, you can ignore the keywords and write the post anyway because you know your audience is interested.
In conclusion, you should plan on targeting a keyword with every post, but there are plenty of valid reasons to skip keyword research occasionally.
Can you do keyword research after a post is written?
If your post is already written then you can skip to step 4: finding related keywords.
Since the post is written, the topic is already decided, which means you can’t benefit from the topic research phase. Instead, select a keyword that matches your topic and then find related keywords and variations to inject throughout the post.
Conclusion
- Keyword research helps you in numerous ways.
- Your post gets more visitors now and over the long run
- You get deeper insight into what people are looking for
- You get new ideas for blog posts