In this video, John McDougall from McDougall Interactive explains keyword research. He outlines why it’s necessary when writing blog posts, and he mentions a few tools that can help with keyword research.
What is keyword research? If you just write a blog post and you don’t pick the keywords and know what you’re targeting, that blog post probably won’t get any visibility. But if you use a keyword research tool, like SEMRush or AHREFS free keyword generator, and there are a lot of them…Ubersuggest by Neil Patel is great. If you use these tools, you’re going to figure out the monthly search volume on all the different ways people are phrasing things as they’re typing things into Google.
If you look at the monthly search volume, and then write blog posts around things that get a reasonable search volume, maybe not the most search volume if your website is small because you got to start with the long tail or more niche things that Google will more likely rank your small site for.
But if you use those types of phrases that you see in the keyword research to write your blog posts and sprinkle in a bunch of related keywords, you’re going to have a much better chance of coming up in Google than if you just write haphazardly. And believe it or not, a lot of writers that are really good writers have no idea of how to do keyword research.
I’m shocked when we find writers that have never even heard of these tools. Even some international companies that we work for that are media companies, like magazines, they’ve got all these writers out there just pumping out blog posts and they’re not even doing this stuff. Even better would be to do competitive analysis. You can take one of your best ranking competitor websites, put the URL into SEMRush, and it’ll show you every keyword they’re ranking for. And you can, of course, look at your keywords that you’re ranking for and see where you’re missing out and compare yourself to them. So without these types of keyword research tools, you’re really putting yourself at a disadvantage.