Keyword Research: From Short to Long-Tailed Keyword Case Study

byfiftarina

1.1K followers

8 years ago

Hi fellow WA members,

How many of you have experience the following..?

You got a new blog post idea and keyword to pursue.

Then you open WA Keyword Tool (or Jaaxy), and found that your chosen keyword is too competitive.

What do you usually do?

Do you abandon that keyword and try to find a new one?

Today I'd like to share you a little bit of how I did my keyword research, with a little case study and current result.

My initial idea: write an article about 'power pumping'.

(PS: If you don't know what power pumping is, don't worry, it's just a popular term in my niche =D).

I got excited and open up WA Keyword Tool to check the keyword competitiveness.

And here's what I got:

The monthly search is good, not so high but no too low either.

But when I checked the QSR, boom.... there are 329 competitors (this is too high).

So, I tried to dig related search terms.

But most the first related 10 terms only have a little search volume.

But hey, there's one with >100 monthly searches, so I dig that one.

And here's what I got.

The first and second search terms are pretty similar, but I prefer the second one, so I checked the QSR.

Woohoo.. finally, I got QSR less than 100, and even less than 50.

So I used this keyword in my article 'power pumping to increase milk supply' and created the best article I could for this post.

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That was around 6 months ago.

Today, I checked how well this article performs in Google.

I was pleasantly surprised that this article not only rank in the first page for my chosen keyword 'power pumping to increase milk supply', it also ranks in the first page for the original keyword 'power pumping'.

Not only that, it also ranks in the first page for more than 50 other related keywords, here's a little snippet from my GSK, showing the top performing keywords

What is the take home point here?

1. When you got a blog post idea, and found that your chosen keyword seems too competitive, don't stop there and abandon that keyword.

2. Check for other related keywords with decent monthly searches and super low competition. Usually these keywords are longer phrase, and thus its name: long-tailed keyword. Sometimes, first time 'digging' won't give you any usable keywords, but you need to be creative. Perhaps add some preposition, question words, and see if you can find a better keyword.

3. Once you found a good keyword, use it in your article with proper keyword placement (title, description, alt-image, etc).

4. Your job does not stop here. Get creative and create the most compelling article for this topic. Be unique, don't just copy others.

5. When you do this, don't be surprised if your article will rank for multiple keywords, and finally you will enjoy a decent traffic daily, just from a single article.

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I hope this case study gives you a better idea on how to do keyword research until you finally find the keyword with low competition.

Cheers,

Rina