Google Content Development: How To Find Attainable Keywords To Get Highly Targeted Visitors

Question: How Do You Place Your Website on Google's Organic (SEO) First Page?

Answer: A Systematic Keyword Research, Analysis And Content Mapping Process.

Keyword research and analysis is the foundation of online marketing.

This is important for search engines, but pretty much everything else: Social media, videos, podcasts and many more. Plus, vertical directories utilize on-site keyword search as the needlepoint for entry to results. And, as voice search is coming into its own, keyword research and context is essential.

Until you understand the basic concepts and apply them to your website(s), you’re just swinging in the dark and not likely to do much more than strikeout.

There’s too much global competition, especially if you fall into a few particular niches, to rely on blind luck.

The good news is that, though sometimes tedious, learning good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques is something you most definitely can do.

As you read this article, keep in mind the importance of the search intent funnel. Keywords should be centered around a topic, and each topic or theme should include content that matches the user's intent at various stages of their search journey:

Let’s get started. By the time you’re done with this article, you’ll be able to keyword hunt with the best of them.

Why Keywords?

Before I go forward with the ins and outs of keyword research and analysis, a quick recap of why I do this in the first place is in order.

There’s a real simple reason I sift through keywords to find the best ones and use them on our websites, and that’s because Google wants us to.

It’s that simple.

Keywords and phrases allow the world’s largest search engine (by far) to decide where each web page will show up in the search engine rankings.

It’s the game Google has established and any marketer who wants to find success must play it. 

Important Note: the idea of LSI keywords and context use is a prominent one. Don't simply stuff keywords into pages and think linearly. The expansion and use of semantic search (searcher's intent and the contextual meaning) in your web content is key to greater incoming web traffic. You simply don't optimize for one or two keywords, but a set of related keywords and phrases within a TOPIC.

That means that you capture all the variations of keyword seeds, expand those into more categories and 'long-tailers', enrich that data and prioritize based on actual results in search engines.

Seed Your List

Your first task in the SEO game is to create a list of foundational keywords and keyword phrases.

For this you need nothing more than the brain in your head. You want to start broad and then go more "narrow" as you move forward.

Brainstorm your way through obvious keywords related to the product, topic, or service (“niche” in internet marketing terminology) you specialize in.

For instance, if you sell Kindles as an Amazon affiliate, your initial seed list might include some of the following:

1. Kindle

2. Kindle accessories

3. Gadgets for Kindle

4. Kindle add-ons

5. Kindle Paperwhite

6. Different types of Kindle

Get the idea?

All you’re doing is starting a list of the words or combinations of words a searcher might type in if they wanted to learn more about and eventually buy a Kindle ebook reader.

There’s no special knowledge or technique needed.

Just put yourself in the mind of a consumer and follow that natural thought process in arriving at this first set of words. 

Generating More Keywords

The ultimate goal here is to generate hundreds if not a thousand or more keywords in this example. (Most B2B markets may have less keywords discovered at first, and while slightly different, also uses the broad-to-narrow keyword approach).

This list, which you will continually add to over time, is the cornerstone of your business because keywords are what you will base your website content around. (This is true for content and keyword expansion as well).

After the seed keywords, what’s next?

I'll be brutally honest up front.

For most individual website owners, it’s difficult to rank for the seed keywords right off the bat without spending a lot of money and time.

You’ll likely devote more time working in the area of long-tail keywords, for which there is less competition.

How do you find long-tail keywords? (defined loosely as keyword phrases comprise of three or more words)

Adding and selecting long-tail keywords in your list can be the most time-consuming part of the process.

I'm going to employ a multi-pronged approach.

The first effort assumes you don’t mind saving yourself a lot of time and effort. What I'm going to suggest now is to figure out what keywords your competitors currently rank for and go after the same ones.

How do you do that? Easier than you might think.

Go to Google.com and enter your first seed keyword and hit “enter.” What you’re going to get back is a search engine listing of the current websites ranking for that keyword.

Obviously, Amazon takes up several slots but if you skim the first page you’ll see a few others: LoveMyFire.com, GriffinTechnology.com, and EbookFriendly.com. 

TIP: Scroll to the bottom of Google result pages and look for "Searches related to..." and you'll see a list of relevant keywords that you can add to your keyword buckets.

Now What?

Armed with the three competitors you uncovered in the previous stage, you’re going to need to find a service/software that will analyze these domains and return a list of keywords they currently rank for.

See what I'm doing here?

By checking which keywords these other sites rank for, you’re building your own list and saving yourself oodles of time also.

Is there a catch? Of course. 

The catch here is that few quality tools want to do this for you for free. Almost all offer a free trial period.

One of the most used, SEMrush.com, lets you get a limited list of competitor keywords (10) for free.

This is a start and should yield some juicy keywords to add to your list.

Whether you decide you want to eventually pay a monthly fee to access a tool’s full feature list is a decision you’ll have to make.

If you don’t have the $50 or more monthly to pay for a keyword analyzer, all is not lost.

You’ll just have to roll up your sleeves and do a little more manual digging.

The Fine Art of Hard Work

There are a handful of decent free keyword tools online.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the Google Keyword Planner for SEO keyword research and analysis. It's meant for paid advertising!

Keep in mind these are not to analyze your competitors keyword rankings but only to generate a list of related keywords to one of your seed.

For this example I'm using www.KeywordTool.io (Ubersuggest is great too!)

For fun, I put in the phrase “Cocoa Beach vacation” and received back a list of 72 related words.

Some of the results:

1. Cocoa Beach vacation rentals

2. Cocoa Beach vacation rentals pet friendly

3. Cocoa Beach vacation home

Each of the above phrases should be considered a keyword to add to your list.

I'm not saying that each is a great keyword, but at this stage I'm just generating as many possibilities as I can.

Continue dropping your various seeds into the keyword tool. It’s an iterative process that should continue as long as you’re finding new possibilities.

Before long, you’ll have a formidable keyword list from which to start the next phase of your mission to achieve first page search results - content building.

The bottom line is that building a keyword list can be the most frustrating of tasks.

Creating a list of attainable keywords

Finding keywords and relevant terms for content development is one thing, as you've seen in the simple examples above. But, how do you prioritize and determine feasibility of quality keywords in the first place?

TIP: LOOK BEYOND the most common strategies (although it should be done):

• Keyword search volume - how much traffic (visitors) can this keyword bring?
• Intent - is the visitor likely to buy from this keyword phrase? (divide into % likelihood)
• Competition - is this keyword heavily used, highly competitive and already seeing trusted sites in the search results?

As mentioned above, collect more than just volume, intent and competition metrics for each keyword phrase.

Additionally, do the research to find your targeted audience.

Do you know who your "perfect" visitor or customer is?

Develop personas that you can use to match keyword intent with that demographic. You can use a tool like https://www.makemypersona.com/ to get started. This will really expand your thinking, and invite company team members to join in this exercise.

Start mapping out (in Excel) the various phrases, types of content and timelines in the content funnel. Your keywords and content should be positioned to match that analysis.

There are many types of content types you can create, publish and promote, as seen below:

To choose your final keywords, manually look at the actual search results and determine who (company websites) are shown, how many backlinks they have and what the trust factors are. If you see a list of results with big brand names, wikipedia, etc - just find another keyword, you'll save yourself lots of time and frustration.

You can use tools like the SEO quake toolbar (automatic integration with SEMrush from above) to get the additional data you need. This is ESSENTIAL.

Sure, it’s a lot of repetition.

Though you should continually add to your keyword research database, you'll have ownership over the life of your website. Keep in mind that once it is created (and maintained) with quality, trusted content to boot - you'll have incoming traffic 'forever' and can always use this process as the starting place for creating new content.

FINAL POINT: Don't forget to track all incoming activity from your web analytics scripts (example: Google Analytics) and determine how well the content is performing. Research, selecting and writing content for keywords is just one part of this journey. You want visitors to engage with your content. That means you have a clear goal for conversion (sales!).

Good luck!

P.S.

If you need additional help with this, we have cool training videos and a team to help.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jon Rognerud is a published best-seller, and the author of "The Ultimate Guide To Search Engine Optimization" books with Entrepreneur Press and Entrepreneur Magazine. His new Keyword Research Book can be found on www.keywordresearchbook.com

His personal blog: www.jonrognerud.com