Keyword Research Tips

There is more than just finding keywords for your subject content using your preferred keyword research tool like Jaaxy.

FIRST TIP: Finish the Wealthy Affiliate training!

When it comes to developing content, your target audience, reader, or customer is the starting point. Their User Experience (UX) is the end point.

From this point on, I will refer to your target audience, customers, or content consumers as readers.

Selection of the appropriate keywords depend upon:

• Reader's search intent
• Keyword selection criteria
• Semantics

Reader's Search Intent

Understanding your reader's search intent is important because we focus on writing for our reader and not for Google.

In a sense, we serve two masters.

The reader and Google.

The ideal web page or post meets both the reader's and Google's requirements to rank on SERP page 1.

The content provides highly relevant, unique information in a useful format the reader seeks and likes while optimized to meet Google's ranking criteria.

Keyword Selection Criteria

The Wealthy Affiliate training does a great job in teaching how to use a keyword search tool. The training shows that keywords we select should have the following criteria:

1. Quoted Search Results (QSR) less than 100
2. Keyword must make grammatical sense
3. Average number of monthly searches greater than 30.

With the Jaaxy tool, we can create lists of relevant keywords related to our website.

I do additional keyword research. I want to look at the competition.

I search my keyword to look at the first page of Google SERP.

This is a screenshot of my keyword "tag formula 1." The red arrow points to the keyword with "review" as a potential product review blog post.

Now that I have a potential keyword, I do a Google search to look at the page 1 competition. My question is whether I can write a review that would "beat" any of the the pages listed.

This is the sreenshot of "tag heuer formula 1" results page. I look at each site listed (other than the ads) to see if I could develop content better than what is shown.

The black bar is the Moz SEO app (Chrome extension) that shows domain and page authority for the websites listed.

By looking at each site, I can evaluate the quality of the competing websites compared to my ability to develop a review post better than any listed.

The answer is NO. So I will look for alternative products to review.

Semantics

Google made a huge change to searches when they introduced semantic searches in their Hummingbird algorithm rollout in 2013. The concept of semantic search eliminated the idea of exact keyword matches by focusing on relationships between words. Think of related terms and synonyms.

Topical context became important to Google when displaying search results.

I occasionally use AnswerThePublic and LSIGraph for keyword research of finding semantic or related keywords.

Google also provides related search terms at the bottom of a SERP.

Next: User Experience (UX)