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Use keyword research with Google to promote your blog

Let me ask you something – what do you do when you want an answer to a question? The question could be anything, the opening time of a local shop or how to cook chicken. I know what I do, I get my phone out and ask Google. I look at the 1st 3 or 4 links and see if they have my answer - If they don’t have the answer, then I search for something else.

I also know what I don’t do. I certainly don’t do anything as stupid as go to the 2nd page on Google, and you know what, neither do you! That’s the thing about Google, the 1st page is everything and the 2nd page is NOWHERE!

If your website ranks on the 1st page on Google, then it’ll be amazing for your blog. You’ll generate tons of free traffic to your website - Google will see this traffic, and place you site even higher on the search results. This becomes an upward spiral, where your future success feeds on your past success. If your website doesn’t rank in Google, then it’ll be close to impossible to make money in the long run.

To rank highly, you need to choose the right keywords to use in your articles. Keyword research with Google isn’t the only SEO technique (Google ranks websites based on 200 factors), but it’s the most important. You need to find keywords that people are searching for, but without much competition from larger websites.

Let me give you an example of a bad keyword with high competition. If you come up to me and say that you want to rank on the 1st page of Google for ‘Breaking News,’ then I can’t help you! In the screenshot above you can see that NBC News and CNN come up in the 1st few entries. To state the obvious, your website won’t rank ahead of these sites for the term ‘breaking news.’ While ‘breaking news’ has a lot of searches by users, there is far too much competition for this search term. You need to find a keyword with low competition.

Below I'll show you how to perform Keyword research with Google, step by step. If you want to find out more about how to run your blog, I suggest to check out my articles on how to set up your travel blog and how to promote your blog on Twitter. I love having a travel blog have had some wonderful experiences, like flying Etihad First Class and staying at the Conrad Maldives.

Step 1. Find keywords on Google

I’ll show you exactly how keyword research works in practise. Let’s say I write an article on how to get upgraded on Delta Airlines. For this article, I may choose the title: ‘How to upgrade on Delta.’

Go to Google and search ‘how to upgrade on delta.’ In the screenshot above, we see that the 1st entry is from delta.com. Take a look at the box ‘People also Ask’ and make a note of the search terms that people also asked. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and write down the search terms below the text ‘Searches related to how to upgrade on delta.’

I have shown this process in the screenshots above.

The search terms I’ve identified, are all candidates for keywords that we can use in our article. We just need to find out which of the keywords have low competition. I’ve re-printed all of the possible keywords below:

  • How do I get an upgrade on Delta?
  • Can I upgrade my Delta flight?
  • delta upgrade chart
  • delta upgrade cost
  • delta upgrade list
  • delta upgrade from basic economy
  • delta comfort upgrade cost
  • delta global upgrade certificates for sale
  • delta upgrade list app
  • delta one international upgrade

Step 2. Find Low competition keywords

To find out which of these keywords have low competition, I use a tool called KW Finder. KW Finder gives you the searched volume and a difficulty score for each keyword, to allow you to identify which keywords have low competition on Google. They also give you alternative suggestions for similar keywords.

KW Finder have a free trial where you don’t need to input a credit card, so make sure you sign up and see if you like it. It’s one of the cheapest tools around, with monthly plans starting at $30 per month. For comparison, SEM Rush charge ~$99/month for their products. I think that their tool is terrific too, but I don’t think it is necessary to spend that much.

Go to KW Finder, and type ‘how to upgrade on delta’ in the search bar, and then click ‘find keywords.’ Full screenshots are given above. The next screen shows a ton of information about this keyword:

  • We see how many search terms there have been for our keyword. There are 210 search terms a month for ‘how to upgrade on delta’
  • We see a ‘keyword difficulty’ score, which tells us how easy it is to rank for this keyword. Keyword difficulty is 25, which is classified as ‘still easy’. 0 is very easy. 100 is very difficult
  • We find a bunch of related keywords that we can use, and the exact same information for those terms too

210 search terms isn’t that many, so we can probably find something better

Step 3. Rinse & repeat

We simply repeat the process from step 1 and step 2, until we find the right keyword:

  • High traffic per month
  • Low keyword difficulty score
  • Related to my article content


Let’s search for ‘Delta upgrade list.’ We see the following information from KW Finder:

  • 1,000 search terms a month
  • Keyword difficulty of 30, which is classified as ‘still possible’


Next I search for ‘delta upgrade chart’, which yields the following information from KW Finder:

  • 590 search terms per month
  • Keyword difficulty of 30, which is classified as ‘still possible’


These 2 keywords are much better, so I will make sure to use the keywords ‘Delta upgrade list’ and ‘delta upgrade chart’ in my article.

This process of Keyword research with Google is a game changer for your blog. You can systematically find the keywords that people are searching for, where there is not competition from other websites. By using these keywords into your article, you can rank on the 1st page of Google in the long run.

Step 4. Use keywords in your article

Once you’ve identified the keywords that you want to use in your article, then make sure to use these words in your article. Keyword stuffing and overuse of your keywords is a big no no. Google’s algorithms are smarter than you and will spot this a mile off! My main advice is to use keywords in a natural way that makes sense in the flow of your article. This ensures that your article makes sense, and is good to read. I suggest to keep keywords at 1-2% of your article

Conclusion

Keyword research with Google is a core SEO method that you need to know. You can promote your blog - it will set you apart from the people that don’t know what they’re doing. By following the simple steps I have given above, you can get your website to rank highly on Google in the long run.

Let me know what you think of my article. Write a comment in the section below!

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