Keyword Research
Keyword research
What is it?
Why do you need it?
How do you do it?
How do you apply it?
What next?
Keyword research is great it helps you find topics to cover and gives you an idea what a potential audience is already searching for.
You may ask Siri, do a Google search, or look around social media.
Keyword research helps us build out structured information that offers guidance and direction to people seeking a solution to a problem.
When done well, keyword research helps flesh out a picture of our audience. It works best when you use your empathy and put yourself in your audiences shoes.
What are they trying to do?
What have they done already?
Why is your answer better than the other answers?
If you understand these concepts, and you can clearly communicate why they should trust your answer. You are ready.
An Example?
What if we wanted to find keywords for this article?
Keyword Research would be the relevant term that this topic is covering.
The results for that keyword?
We can see that we are getting results that are giving guidance from an SEO perspective. That is because keywords are something that Search Engine Optimists use to gain an advantage when seeking to rank content.
We are going to apply those techniques to our content by baking into the processes we use to create content so we will have good SEO for each thing we do, and it will be strategically relevant to our goals, in addition it will solve a problem for our audience.
By thinking ahead we, multiply our effort.
Okay lets dive in now
We know we can use google search to give us the top results, what if we wanted to explore an idea and find an angle thats not so crowded, because I can tell you fighting directly with SEO guys for SEO keywords is too much effort for too little reward.
Enter Google Predictive Search
Google gives an overview of how its autocomplete feature works here
Basically all searches are fed into a machine learning system that tries to anticipate your wants.
So when searching you can get some interesting results by beginning your search and cycling through the alphabet.
Keyword research A
Keyword research B
Keyword research C
As you can see this gives some interesting research and topics that we can dive deeper into later. We are looking for an angle that matches something our potential audience might be interested in.
We can speed this process up by bringing specialty tools into it. You have a few options free would be google Adwords Keyword planner, but there is a caveat you need to have an active adwords account to get full keyword data.
On tool in my toolbox is Keyword Researcher
It is the perfect tool to do the tedious work and get us a list of keywords.
A few seconds and we get 223 keywords, now we need to filter some of these out but there are some interesting angles to look at on the list.
We are going to evaluate by topic, difficulty, potential, and opportunity.
We are looking for an area we can make our mark. That is unlikely to draw heavy competition because we need to have a solid foundation in the next few months.
Since this is for We Flow Creative, lets try to find out what exists for creatives.
This could take a while, if we want to be thorough.
What if we wanted to speed this up?
You have a few options.
What if we wanted what is popular?
Enter Buzzsumo it is a great tool for seeing how many shares across multiple social media platforms a content piece got. This will let us try and find out where we should consider sharing our content.
The top fee articles were popular mostly on Facebook
