My Personal Strategy for Doing Keyword Research for Your Blog Posts

Are you struggling to find the right keywords to use in your blog posts? Ones that you know you can rank for?

Well, in this post, I’m going to show you how I come up with my keyword ideas and blog post titles to match.

How to do keyword research for your blog posts

I’ve been blogging for over 10 years and a content marketer for 2 of those. So I’ve developed a few key techniques for finding the right keywords for your blog post.

It’s easier to show you how I do my keyword research rather than tell you. So press play on the video below to see my strategy:

To come up with my next bunch of blog post titles and find the keywords for them, I usually start with a document I’ve created each month on topics I want to talk about.

This is really rough and just me jotting down ideas, so there’s no real structure. I don’t tend to use fancy software like Trello or Asana. This is how I work best, which is the simplest way possible.

Let’s take a look at the first example in this list. Which is Celebrate The Small Wins In Business To Propel You Forward.

The first thing I do when I’m searching for keywords is I use a tool called Keywords Everywhere.

But first things first, before we can decide what keywords we’re going to pick. We first need to understand where our website stands in terms of ranking on things like Google.

Find your domain authority

The way to do that is to find your domain authority or DA. Your domain authority is a set of numbers that Moz has come up with to determine where you will rank on Google. It’s a good indication for you to compare yourself to your competitors.

You can find out yours on the Moz website.

If I type in my website, Moz will come out and tell me:

• What my domain authority is,
• How many keywords I’m ranking for,
• and how many links I have going to my domain.

Usually, how many links you have going into a domain helps with your domain authority.

Now, typically Moz says an average domain authority is from 40 to 50. But I’d like to take this with a pinch of salt because that refers to niches that are larger than maybe the niche that you have.

My niche is introverted businesswomen. So a domain authority of 23 and the less competition that I have on Google for those types of keywords will mean that I’m more likely to rank higher.

You can also use this tool to check your competitors or people in the same niche as you. Use it to see what domain authority they are so you can see how well you might rank in terms of competing with them on Google.

The first stage of keyword research

Okay, so let’s get back to the blog post ideas. As a reminder, my first topic is Celebrate The Small Wins In Business To Propel You Forward. So I’m going to type into Google ‘celebrate small wins’.

As I said before, I’m using a tool called Keywords Everywhere.

Underneath where you’ve typed your keyword, you can see how many people search for this keyword string every month. So that’s 260 people every month searching ‘celebrate the small wins’ at the time of writing.

On the right-hand side of the page, it’ll tell you a few other things people search for that are relevant to that search query. If you think the first thing you searched for isn’t quite right, you can see if there’s anything that’s more applicable.

Looking at other people’s results

One other thing to note is all of the other websites that are ranking for this keyword. Are they well-established sites? Do they have a high domain authority? If so, it might be quite hard for you to rank for this keyword.

Search intent

The other thing to bear in mind is looking at the type of titles people already have for these blog posts.

Are they relevant to the type of blog posts you want to write?

I wanted to write a blog post about celebrating the small wins to get you further ahead in business. In this case, it might work well because the first in the list is Harvard Business Review and the second is How To Celebrate Small Wins To Achieve Big Goals.

That is the type of article I want to write, and I’ll have a differentiating factor here to make it stand out and more likely to rank higher, which is that I’m going to be talking about specifically getting ahead in business.

When you’re doing your keyword research, make sure that you have these things in mind:

• The number of people searching for it every month.
  • More people searching doesn’t always mean better, it just means you’ll have more competition.
• The search intent of the keyword, which means, are all the articles appearing on Google relevant to the type of article you want to write?
  • If they’re not relevant, your intent for the keyword is different from the majority of the world’s intent.
• Who is already ranking for these keywords?
• Can you compete with them?

Using an advanced tool

Now using a tool like Keywords Everywhere makes it slightly harder to actually see if you’re going to be able to rank for these keywords or not.

So I’m going to share with you a tool that I use in my business to fully see if I’m going to rank for these keywords or not.

Note: I’m a freelance content marketer so I pay over £100 per month for this tool. It’s pretty advanced, but it’s really worth it.

Ahrefs is an amazing tool that gives you a lot of information on your website and how it’s ranking. But for this post, we’re going to be looking at how we rank for this particular keyword that I found in Google.

I’m going to type in ‘celebrate the small wins’, and Ahrefs has told me that not only is the search volume of people smaller than what Keywords Everywhere initially told me. In fact, it’s 0-10 people per month.

Plus the difficulty of ranking for it is a medium, which is something I generally don’t go for with my lower domain authority.

So if you scroll down, you’ll be able to see all of the sites ranking for this keyword and their domain authority. In this case, Ahrefs calls it domain rating.

You can see that the first two have a very high domain rating and there are a few in the list that have a slightly low one. But it also tells you different keywords you can rank for that they are ranking for.

How do you celebrate small wins, celebrate small victories? These are things that people are searching for more than celebrate the small wins. Again, it’s a medium, but with the higher search volume, it might be worth targeting.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to celebrate small victories.

Creating a clickable blog post title

Okay, so now we have our keyword of choice, which is ‘celebrate small victories’. With that, I can create a blog post title.

In this case, I might come up with a blog post title like How To Celebrate The Small Victories In Business To Propel You Forward.

You want to make sure that you’re fitting with the intent of the people searching for the keyword. You want to make sure you can rank for it, but you also want to make sure you stand out.

There we have it, my techniques for finding keywords for my blog post titles. I usually do this four times for the four posts I’m going to write that month.

Tell me in the comments, do you have any different techniques for doing keyword research for your blog posts or are you going to give mine a go?