6 Tips for Blog Keyword Strategy

Keyword targeting is one of the most important steps of an SEO strategy for any blog or website. Every marketer knows that each page of a website should be optimized with well-researched keywords but many still skip this crucial step. With search behavior changing rapidly among internet users, you cannot risk running a blog or publishing a blog post without a great keyword strategy in place.

Around 4 million blog posts are published every day. With that volume of content coming out on a regular basis, it is evident that publishing content that can rank high on Google is not easy at all. But there are ways you can ensure to achieve your desired search rankings and strategizing and implementing a workable keyword strategy is one of such ways.

Tips for Blog Keyword Strategy

Blogging is not easy as you have to create relevant and useful content for your audience and then drive traffic to it. To get your blog rank on top of search engine results, you need to use optimized blog keywords based on your blog post topics. But the question is how do you find out which keyword should be used in which post?

Now that we know having a great keyword strategy for your blog is as important as it is to have a great content strategy for your creative ads, we should dig deeper into actionable tips and methods that can be used for this purpose. This blog will help you get a better understanding of some tips that have been proven to be successful in generating great results for blogs.

1. Identify opportunity for the right keywords

The first and the most crucial step to the entire process of developing your blog keyword strategy is to identify the right keywords for your content. It most certainly depends on the niche you are targeting along with many other factors such as location, age groups, interests, etc., of your target audience.

Choosing the right keywords can be a challenging task. Only when you have the right keywords, you can expect to drive the traffic to your blog's post. However, more often than not, people tend to make mistakes when selecting the right keywords. It takes years of experience to do it successfully.

For topics that are trending on search engines and/or social media, you can make use of tools like Google Trends to discover trending topics with good search volumes. Alternatively, if you are aiming for recurring traffic, you need to fetch data from your own analytics tool.

Consulting your own analytic data will help you in the best way possible. Why? Your data will reveal how much of your traffic is generated through what keywords, giving you a better idea of what keywords you can target for your next blog post. For instance, if your blog is about health & fitness and the keyword “fitness routine for students” is generating substantial traffic but you don’t have a dedicated post written on this topic, write one!

In simple terms, SEO keyword research is the practice of discovery, evaluation, and integration of phrases and words used in search queries across the internet. Successful keyword research is the cornerstone of an effective SEO strategy. It helps in figuring out the targeted audience across the internet while enabling you to optimize your pages adequately. Irrelevant keywords not only reduce the traffic and ranking but also misguide the users increasing your bounce rate. Using the right form of a keyword is also crucial for boosting your site’s traffic. Analyze the search volume and competition for the keyword for optimizing your content and improving your ranking.

Keyword research in depth

Know your audience:

To find keywords for blog posts (or for any online content), you first need to know exactly who you are writing for. If your blog isn’t new, this process may seem repetitive, but it is still important to refine and expand on your ideal audience. For example, if you run a travel blog about a specific city and have a reader persona for it, why not take those same principles and apply them to a new blog that you are writing?

Look at keyword’s search volume

Keyword volume is important in SEO, but don’t forget to factor in keyword relevancy. For instance, if you run an online men’s clothing store, you may want to choose a lower-volume keyword like “dress shirts” over a high-volume term like “shirt.” Because “shirt” is very general and is relevant to a very broad audience, it may not be as valuable for your specific business.

2. Focus on long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are always a better choice when it comes to choosing the right keywords for your blog. Long-tail keywords don’t have high search volume but due to less competition, have a great chance of ranking your content on top. Long-tail keywords are needless to say of great importance in blog optimization. The more specific the keyword is, the better the chance it has of ranking on top.

When we talk about long-tail keywords, we are referring to long phrases that could be queries or search terms such as the following:

• Is nighttime good for exercise?
• Are long-tail keywords good for SEO
• B2B digital marketing services
• Matching wedding and bridesmaid dresses

Since the above phrases include multiple small keywords and also serve as individual search terms or queries, we identify such phrases as long tail keywords.

These phrases provide answers to the queries many internet users are searching for. They are also good for conversion (if you are using your blog for affiliate marketing or selling a product or service through your blog) since many long-tail keywords show that users have a buying intent.

How to start?

Long-tail keywords have a great chance of ranking your content on top due to less competition. A good way to search for long-tail keywords is through services like Google Adwords keyword tool and the keyword.io.

Another great way to figure out long-tail keywords is to focus on FAQs and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords recommended by Google itself. Depending on your topics and niche, you can list down one or two long-tail keyword(s) to target in your blog post.

3. Identify and Place Your Blog in the Funnel

You need to understand the purpose of having a blog and what should be the funnel. Chances are that you probably want people to buy a product or service through your blog. In that case, your blog serves as the top of the funnel.

It is very important for a blog marketer to understand how a sales funnel works. Without an apt understanding of how the sales funnel works for B2B and B2C businesses, you cannot use your blog effectively to generate great results.

The B2B and B2C sales funnel strategy is aimed at creating leads. The first role of a blog is to create traffic. According to the sales funnel strategy, it is easiest to get people that are interested in your offering, however only those interested and aware can become your customers.

Think of your blog as a showroom. People do not visit a showroom to buy something, they visit to learn more about your business, what products are you offering, and how well they connect with your brand. Or think of your blog as a medium where you write about topics that interest your audience.

Do Not treat your blog as a depository for content where you keep publishing blog posts and articles without any strategy and direction on how to convert your traffic into potential and happy customers.

4. Focus on the Key Topic

When you’re creating a blog post or page, you want to use keywords that directly relate to the subject matter of your post. It’s not necessarily the case that you’ll rank on the first page for these words—it depends on how competitive the topic is—but it can help. Moreover, it will help create more focused content that is more likely to engage readers.

Think about the overarching topics you’ll be covering on your blog. Perhaps you want to rank for financial tips? One of those categories might be “investment basics.” Within that are a number of potential topics—”stock market,” “mutual funds,” or “Financial Aid.”

Narrow down your topic into easily digestible pieces of content. Writing effectively is not about writing long form posts and stringing multiple keywords together. It's about creating a piece of content that helps your reader and is built around a keyword that you want to rank for, but only if you can use that keyword in context, rather than having it sound forced.

5. Leverage Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is important in blogging because readers are drawn to authoritative sources that offer knowledge and insight. Thought leadership helps bloggers stand out among their competitors and it establishes them as experts on a certain topic.

If you're a B2B business, then you know the need to be constantly shifting in response to the influx of competition in your space and to be always staying top of mind with your target audience. To stand out from the pack, becoming recognized as an authority means practice thought leadership blogging. Blogging is an undeniable necessity for B2B businesses. But it takes more than loyal readership and unique content to get you there; it takes thought leadership. Thought leaders are best positioned to reap the rewards that come with being a leader in your market or industry.

Demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership by educating your clients on which steps they need to take to achieve their goals. This can be as simple as writing an informative blog post or creating an eBook filled with tutorials of how to do certain tasks and fix common problems. The whole purpose behind this type of content is to help your customers make better decisions, without your involvement.

6. Optimize Your Blog Post

There are many essentials you need to take care of when writing and optimizing your blog post. It may seem easy but it is a great effort if you want to curate content that gets ranked on Google.

• The first and the most important step is to use the keyword is the title tag. It serves as a key signal for search engines to identify your blog post as a relevant piece for your potential audience.
• By optimizing your blog for the keyword "blogging," you'll be able to attract people searching for that phrase. The best way to do this is through the use of meta tags. The title and description tag of your post are visible in search results, and incorporating a relevant keyword here will help it appear in organic results. There are also a few image tags that are important on your images. For example, the alt text will be displayed if an image cannot be found and the picture tag helps with SEO if used correctly. You may want to look into hiring a professional writer who understands how optimizing images and posts can benefit your business. This is one of those instances where you certainly get what you pay for.
• Internal linking is an important SEO strategy that boosts your website's exposure, visibility and search engine rankings. If you develop a huge blog with lots of videos and home recipes, for example, you can strategically add links to your index pages with optimized anchor texts. With that, you will quickly improve the PageRank of your most important pages.
• Once you’ve optimized every aspect of your content, don’t forget to promote it. Include a link to the content in your social media posts, “like” or retweet it and ask others to do the same. Informing others of your exceptional piece of writing will not only help readers but will aid search engines in indexing it more effectively.

How Do You Know If Your Blog Keyword Strategy Is Working?

After you have done all the essential steps to write and optimize your blog post as per the requirements, you will now wonder how to know if your strategy is working.

Whether you're just getting started with blogging or have been blogging for several years, one question you may be grappling with is whether or not your keyword strategy is really working. It can be difficult to tell if your keyword selection strategy is giving you the results you're looking for.

It’s important to know how well your SEO strategy is working. Without tracking, it’s easy to overestimate the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. One of the most important tools for tracking search engine rankings is a blog. Judd Bagley of LinkedIn suggests using keyword ranking checker websites to track the progress in organic keyword rankings.

To Sum Up

We hope that this article helped you in getting a better understanding of how to write blog posts backed by a sound keyword strategy. All the tips and methods mentioned above are important and should be taken into consideration whenever you write a blog post for your business or blog website.

Keep in mind that there are many other factors that come into play when it comes to ranking of your blog posts.