Number 4 in a series, Business Blog FAQs, culled from my business blog consulting practice.
Keyword Analysis Makes Your Blog SEO Efficient
Keyword Research Is Key to Blogging Success
- Your business is thick with online competitors
- Your topics are popular across the internet
- You are trying to dominate a specific niche in the market
- You need conversions – i.e., people taking action on your site such as buying or asking for information
In these cases, investing in a business blog without evaluating the search terrain is like winging it on every sales call. You might luck out and score an occasional order, but you’re more likely to strike out, and do so in embarrassing fashion. Here’s a rough overview of how to conduct simple keyword research.
- Identify the pages of your website you want customers to land on.
- Write down all the phrases you can think of that customers would use when searching for your products and services on those landing pages.
- Poll trusted customers to validate your keyword selections and get new keyword ideas.
- Do test searches on Google and see who comes up on top for your list of keyword phrases. “View Source” and see what keywords they’re using – you’ll get more ideas.
- Compare keyword selections for each landing page on a keyword research tool – the Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a good one. Take note of the relative search volumes for your terms and suggested alternates. As a rule of thumb, you can rule out terms with search volume that is too high or too low.
- Develop a final list of 3-4 keyword phrases to associate with each landing page.
- Use blog posts to link to those pages, using keywords in anchor text.
- Proceed for 90 days.
- Evaluate.
- Tweak.
Sometimes keyword research and analysis is simple enough for DIY SEO. Sometimes not. If you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, my content optimization services include handling this aspect of business blog development.
Bottom line – Research keywords before publishing your first post, and then use blog posts to support landing pages on your site.
Over to You
Have you approached search engine optimization “by feel” or “by the numbers”? How is it working for you?
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Hi Brad – This is good advice. I did use much the same approach you outlined. But I switched my blog at the beginning of the year from /blog to .com and also switched to another host and my traffic plummeted. But, I’ve been so ill for much of the year that I didn’t really think about it. Anyway, I googled one of my posts before and the link didn’t work.
It turns out that somehow, during all the changes – my permalinks were set to default, so search engine links to all my old posts weren’t working. I have just changed it but now I’ll need to go through this years posts and change them back.
So, people should do everything you said in this post, because it works. But also, watch out for silly mistakes or you’ll undo all your hard work.
By the way – just wanted to add that Google Adword Keyword tool is a great suggestion. I used to pay for Wordtracker every month and my results really improved when I started using Google Adword tool instead – and it’s free.
Ensuring your business site is built off of wordpress is a great start – Wordpress does make SEO much easier than your traditional website platforms.
It takes time but in many cases, achieving high SEO for desired keywords can easily (read – not quickly, but easily) be done.
Thanks for sharing the very nice info.
Cath, Hope you are feeling better! Transferring domains and hosts can be tricky business: I wouldn’t even attempt it without help from a skilled WordPress webmaster. Jesse Petersen, who helped redesign my blog, recently took me through a hosting change, and when it works, it works well. Sorry you have to do so much work to restore those links, but you’ve got so many great posts it’s definitely worth the effort.
Barbara, WordPress definitely makes the SEO job easier. I’m finding Thesis in particular to be very strong.
I’ve been playing with Google Analytics recently out of curiosity and have been rather surprised at which key words were actually driving traffic. For me this has been an on again off again exercise and so I might be, unfortunately, a prime example of random. I find it very difficult to drive writing and ideas based on keywords. Seems to encourage writing blocks and delays in posting for me. Do you usually work with clients to get the words worked in after the fact through an editing process or is that too clunky?
Hi Fred, Yes, I do work with clients to massage content for keywords. If it’s done right, it’s not clunky at all.
Well written, Brad! Once again you proven how SEO isn’t something you do in a few minutes like many so-called experts think it does. I think too many writers declare themselves SEO experts, when they’re really not. You’ve earned my respect here!
Meryl, Thanks. I’ve learned that SEO copywriting requires ongoing study as well. Rules and best practices change all the time.