How Important Is Keyword Research for Your Blog?

Posted on 19. Jul, 2011 by Anthony Sudbury in Blogging

How Important Is Keyword Research for Your Blog

Keyword research is overlooked

Keyword research is the most overlooked task for SEO and yet it is the most important. To not only get good rankings in the search engines particularly Google it is not only time consuming but also extremely costly. So with this in mind it is very important to get the right keywords so that you can make money and also be free to concentrate on other areas of marketing.

How Important Is Keyword Research for Your Blog?

The mistake everyone makes is concentrating Keyword Research on keywords just for their home page and they forget about optimising inside pages or they think it is not as important and yet home page is generally 10% or less of the overall searches being found when users land to your site.

Another mistake is webmasters or so called SEO pro’s rely too much on highly searched keywords using Google Keywords tool, although this is useful for determining keywords that are highly searched, it can be extremely difficult because the competition for those keywords are usually extremely high.

Google Insights, Google Competition and Google Trends

So what I like to focus on particularly for my Keyword Research when trying to rank high is words that have long term potential and are low competition, this ensures that I will stay in good position for a long time. So with this I use Google Insights, Google Competition and Google Trends.

What I love about Google Insights for example is it gives a percentage of the overall searches conducted for the month and when you weigh this up with Google Trends and gather its overall search popularity each month it is a more determining factor when considering keywords based in its competition, because if you see rise in trends with low competition then you know that this keyword you would like to target will not only be easy in maintaining position but also profitable because its popularity is on an upscale.

It is said that if your site holds a lot of authority including strong backlinks you can rank quicker and higher for more competitive keywords so you can target sites that generally have 1 million to 10 million competing pages. For blogs that are fairly new or have still some time to hold good foundation, I recommend Keyword Research targeting less competitive keywords around 1 million or lower, 100,000 or lower is more ideal for totally new blogs.