What is keyword research?

I managed to make almost $6500 from my affiliate blog in the month of May 2020 and keyword research is one of the main reasons that I feel I have been able to pull the traffic from Google to be able to earn this income. Keyword research essentially lets you pick your battles to give you the highest chance of actually ranking your content in a search engine to get traffic and is often missed out by so many bloggers.

Although there are countless paid keyword research tools on the market these days, I don't actually use any of the higher price point tools as I feel most, if not all of them are close to useless. Other than spending around $10 on the Keywords Everywhere plugin to get predicted search volumes for keywords, my own personal keyword research methods are essentially free and just take time to do.

Although you can avoid this $10 for keywords everywhere by going with the Keyword Surfer plugin that is free, I actually prefer to use both of them as the both use slightly different ways to work out the predicted search volume for a keyword. In my experience though, the keywords everywhere plugin is definitely more accurate than the keywords surfer plugin.

In my opinion, proper keyword research is essentially broken down into two different sections, first you have keyword acquisition where you actually source your keywords from Google and second you have keyword competition analysis where you go into the competition of the keyword. Both are essential and both can be done for free without the need to spend $50-$100 a month on any of these expensive keyword research tools that you see on the market.

For keyword acquisition, I often use Google Autosuggest where you type in the start of a keyword relevant to your niche (if you need help choosing a niche for your blog then I cover it in more detail here) and then you let the Google Autosuggest give you keyword ideas as shown in the image below.

The 12,100/mo and similar information is from the Keywords Everywhere plugin giving me a prediction of the estimated monthly search volume for each keyword. As you can see though, Google can give you some quick and easy ideas for your keywords for your blog but unfortunately, my of these initial keywords will be higher competition than the vast majority of new bloggers will ever be able to rank for.

You can take this a step further by adding in more of the initial search query and letting Google expand the suggested search terms to get keywords that are often lower competition and easier to rank. As you can see in the image below, I have changed the search term from “best pen for” to “best ballpoint pen for” and as you can see, adding this one additional word has changed up the suggested terms.

As you can see in the image above, many of the suggested search terms do not have a predicted search volume to the right of them. This is due to Keywords Everywhere predicting that this is a zero search volume keywords but this can also be used to your advantage. Although that exact keyword may not get many search per month, there is a high chance that it will actually get long-tail searches and one time searches allowing you to still get traffic with it.

I go into my zero search volume keyword strategy more here and I would highly recommend that anyone new to blogging gives that keyword research method a try. As tools think these keywords get no searches, their competition can be very low and you will often be able to rank for the search term quickly and with minimal effort required.

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/2020/01/httpswebsolpak.html

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-is-keyword-research.html

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/2020/01/advocate-office.html

As I explain in the linked video above, many of my zero search volume keyword articles bring in over 50 searches per month. These are buyer intent, affiliate keywords too for higher price point items with one of my domains running at around $80 per 1000 hits and another at just over $100 per 1000 hits too.

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/search/label/SEO

This means that if I publish 20 articles targeting zero search volume keywords that bring in around 50 searches per month with buyer intent in my niches, I can usually expect $80-$100 income per month and then scale everything up from there. I share some tips and tricks that I have picked up over the years on how I am able to publish my blog articles to quickly here that can help you churn out these articles even quicker to scale too.

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-is-keyword-research.html

If you are wanting to go with an informational intent blog based around display ads for monetization rather than affiliate links, I would highly recommend that you check out the Answer The Public tool to generate your initial keywords rather than using the Google Autosuggest as covered above. In my opinion, the Answer The Public system is much quicker and easier for informational keywords whereas Google Autosuggest tends to be better for buyer intent keywords.

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/2020/07/which-website-is-good-for-backlinking.html

When it comes to the keyword competition analysis section of actually checking if you will be able to rank the keywords from the keyword acquisition section above, there really are a number of different things that you are able to do. You have to factor in your on-page SEO and your off-page SEO strategies to try and work out if you are going to be able to compete with the articles already ranking in Google.

https://websolpak.blogspot.com/2020/07/why-should-you-avoid-creating-backlinks.html

If you are new to blogging, my advice would be to install the free Moz toolbar in your browser and search each of the search terms that you found from the keyword acquisition section above. This will add an overlay just under the pages currently ranking for the term with some additional information that you are able to use to help make a more informed decision on if you will be able to beat an article already ranking in Google.