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SEO: Using Keywords to Optimise Your Blog

Posted By Mohammed Faris on April 30th, 2020 in Search Engine Optimisation

Have you ever been in a sticky situation where you put your time, resources and effort into writing that article and it doesn’t rank anywhere? Sadly it happens, if your blog is not SEO optimised.

Now you may need to ask yourself a couple of questions:

Are there people searching for it?
Am I addressing my target audience, and do I speak their language?
Am I using enough keywords in my blog content?
Did I use keywords to structure my blog?
And a lot more…

One thing you need to understand is that search queries reflect human behaviour. Every time someone performs a search in Google, they are looking to solve a problem, find answers and so on. A successful blogging strategy depends on identifying the searcher’s intent and answering it.

To make this guide beginner-friendly, I’ll start by explaining a couple of things.

What are keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases that a user uses to perform a search on Google or other search engines.

Every search query has an intent tied to it such as informational, navigational and transactional.

Let’s see what types of search intent, known as user intent, mean in simple terms:

Types of Search Intent:

Informational

A user is looking for information on google. E.g., “Strategies to a successful blogging strategy.” or “How to bake lemon chicken?”.

Navigational

A user looking to navigate a specific location of a website or a place like “Pizza hut near me” or “Facebook.” A person searching for “Facebook” is likely to navigate to the Facebook website.

Transactional

A user with a purchasing intent like in these instances: “buy groceries online” or “buy iPhone 11 online”.

Now that you’ve understood what different types of searchers’ intent behind keywords are, we can move on to refining your blogging strategy using keywords.

How to create a successful blogging strategy using keywords

A successful blogging strategy will have a solid base of keyword research. Well, not always, though.

Let’s take a situation where you are not addressing an existing problem but introducing a whole new idea or your personal experience. In this scenario, you won’t get much organic traffic just because no one is searching for it.

But this doesn’t mean your blog won’t perform well. Blogs and content with no searches may perform well on platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Quora!

But my advice would be to create and cater content around what people are searching for. Because these are the long term guarantees of free organic traffic from Google. This can be achieved with a solid keyword research

What keywords should I include in my blog?

Let me start by saying what keywords you shouldn’t pick. First of all, you don’t want to rank for keywords that do not serve the purpose of your blog, or you don’t want to invite the audience out of your target circle. What happens when this audience comes to your blog is, they leave quickly if they find your content irrelevant or not precisely what they’re looking for. Which would lead to a higher bounce rate on your blogs and higher bounce rates are never good.

When you’re choosing a keyword, you need to always think about how it is going to reflect on your audience. The key to selecting keywords depends on how well you understand your target audience.

There are a bunch of different keyword tools out there which will give you several keywords with high search volumes. But, you don’t need to use all these keywords in your blogging strategy. It’s always good to create a keyword bucket where you can do a more in-depth analysis of those keywords that reflect your audience persona.

A better understanding of your audience can help you choose the right keywords.

Things to consider while choosing keywords for your blog:

Evaluate your keyword difficulty score:

Keywords tools assign a score for the keywords indicating its difficulty level to rank high on SERPs for that keyword. It would be better to choose keywords with a low difficulty score if your blog is pretty new, and you have low domain authority.

Evaluating the keyword search volume:

Search volumes give an estimate of how many users are searching for that keyword in a month. Keywords with high search volume can be tempting to choose. But the question is, will you be able to rank for that keyword? It’s always good to go for keywords that are more relevant to your target audience. Even though some long-tail keywords have low search volume compared to generic keywords, these are easier to rank for and also convert better.

LSI Keywords:

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords are those keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword used in a search query. Using LSI keywords can help you provide more contextual information and helps improve your content quality.

How to use keywords on your blog?

Google has become smarter at reading the content on the page than ever before. So stuffing the keywords you want to rank for does not work anymore. It is good to put quality over quantity and try to answer the searcher’s query in the best possible way. Aim at having your blog optimised for users and not just search engines; this is essentially what Google encourages content creators to do.

A few tips to use your keywords for your blog content:

Continuously ask yourself if your content answers the searcher’s question or only includes keywords.
Always do your research. See the search results in Google for the keywords that you want to rank for. Is your content providing more value than what’s already ranking on the SERPs? If not think about how you can create a page better than that.
You don’t need to have separate pages for the keywords you want to rank for.
If you’re writing a blog post about “the best tyres for cars”, you can use the same blog post to target keywords like “best off road tyres for cars”, “winter tyres for cars”, “high-performance tyres for cars” etc.

Now that you read until here. Go ahead and give it a try. You may not achieve the results you are looking for in the first try. But this is a learning process, and there is always room for optimisation.

You may want to keep an eye on your search console and analytics to see what brings you clicks and impressions and based on that information, look on how you can further improve your page.

Happy blogging!