If you have never thought to use keyword research as a way to improve the visibility of your blog posts, think again.
Whenever we search for information online, what do we do? We do a Google (or Bing, or Yahoo) search. It makes sense, then, that if you want your blog to get found and read (and shared and commented on), you should include the keywords people are currently using in their searches.
For instance, I just did a search for web video templates for another blog post I was writing. Not only did I find companies that offer templates, but I found plenty of blog posts, articles, and videos about web videos in general and web video templates specifically in the search results.
Now, the term “web video” is a very broad keyword search term and is therefore pretty competitive. Whether you are a management consultant, graphic designer, plumber, or attorney, you’ll run into the same problem: broad keywords won’t help you get found because they are used so often.
You need to do 2 things to find better keywords: 1.) get more specific and find less competitive keywords, and 2.) hone in on those keywords that could generate huge traffic.
Let’s use an attorney as our example, because I know a bunch of super fun and very capabile attorneys who must compete in this very broad category.
Our attorney specializes in employment law; specifically litigating discrimination cases. He is writing a series of blog posts about employment law that are aimed at small businesses.
Using Market Samurai (you can download a free trial version that is good for 2 weeks), I searched “employment law” and got 47 million results. This blog post, though, is a guide for small businesses – that gets 15.2 million results –that focuses on racial disrimination – that gets just under 3.5 million results.
So you see, the more our attorney focused on keywords specific to this particular blog post, the better the chance his blog post will be found online.
To really take advantage of search engine optimization, our attorney needs to use those keywords in the title of his post, in subheadings in the body of his post, in the text itself (of course!), and in the image tags.
Try it yourself and see if it helps your blog posts generate more traffic!
Image courtesy of creative design agency Arrae.
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