As promised in my last post, I’ll cover the process of finding good long tail keywords for your blog. Here is the first part. Part two will be next Sunday.
Part 1: Generate an initial keyword list.
There are a couple ways to come up with your initial list of keywords.
First, use an SEO tool. My favorite ones are Google AdWords: Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Tool. If you’re not too tech savvy, don’t worry. These tools are easy to use.
Basically, you enter in the name of your blog’s niche and the tool will spit out a bunch of related keywords. So, let’s pretend I have a sports car blog. I typed in sports cars in Google’s tool. Here’s a sample of what came up.
- classic sports cars
- top sports cars
- new sports cars
- sports car pictures
- cheap sports cars
- bmw sports car
- racing sports cars
- luxury sports car
Second, you can use SEMRush, another SEO tool, to discover keywords that generate traffic for other sites. With this tool, you simply type in the URL of a site without the “http://” and the tool will show you 1000 of their keywords. It’s a good idea to choose sites with similar popularity as yours. For example, choose blogs with similar PageRank and Alexa Rank.
SEMRush has a monthly fee. However, you should be able to do all your research in a month and you can save your data in Excel or csv format.
Third, put yourself in the reader’s place. Ask yourself, “What would an internet search type to find my blog?” Brainstorm a list of search terms people might use to discover your posts (including future posts you plan to write).
Also, try to come up with a wide variety of keywords that target different subgroups in your niche. Oftentimes, we get into a rut where we write about the same topics. Our posts target many of the same keywords, so we miss out on the opportunity of seeing if we could rank for other keywords.
Let’s go back to my sports car blog for an example. Here are some keywords I came up with. Notice how each keyword targets a different subgroup within the sports car niche.
- how to drive a fast car
- how to sell your sports car online
- which company makes the best sports cars
- new sports cars in 2009
- modifications to increase the speed of your sports car
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