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By Brian Lang – Founder, Small Business Ideas Blog
Finding and using the right keywords is essential when it comes to running a successful blog. Brian Lang, owner of Small Business Ideas Blog, covers how to research the best keywords.
Blogging is a great way for freelance writers and authors to showcase their skills and start building a following.
Bloggers that can successfully grow their following also find it easier to get high paying freelance work, grow a profitable business, or launch new books successfully.
Although any writer can create a blog post, getting traffic to a blog is a common challenge that many bloggers face.
One of the easiest ways to improve the effectiveness of your blog is to do keyword research and incorporate some relevant keywords into your writing.
While you won’t rank for any highly competitive keywords just by adding keywords into your content, you might be able to get a little search traffic for less competitive keywords.
And after a while, that traffic can add up.
Google’s Keyword Planner is the most commonly used keyword tool. But the problem with this tool is that it only provides a limited amount of data.
Luckily, other tools have been developed that reveal more keywords that you can target. Here are a few easy to use tools that you can use to do keyword research. And most of them are free:
One way to get keyword ideas is to see what your most successful competitors are writing about.
Tag Crowd allows you to copy and paste any text into their search box or enter a URL and it will create a keyword cloud from the text on the page. The visual display of keywords makes it easy to see what words or phrases are important on the page.
The words that are larger are more prominent in the word cloud. This can give you some insight on what other keywords they might be targeting on their page.
Since Google doesn’t reveal all of its data, the Wordstream keyword tool is an alternative that might be worth checking out. Wordstream maintains and updates its own keyword database, which it gets from internet service providers, browser data, and other search engines.
Just enter a keyword phrase in the search box and it will display a list of other related keywords that you can use in your content.
Keywordtool.io is a fairly new tool that uses keyword suggestions to generate a lot of keyword ideas. This tool is pretty easy to use and one nice feature is that you can export the data.
Keyword suggestion data can be drawn from Google, Bing, YouTube, and even the App Store.
Answer the public is a keyword tool that can generate questions and phrases that people might use. These questions can make great topics for new blog posts if you are struggling to come up with blog post ideas.
The questions are even grouped together and displayed visually.
If you don’t mind purchasing a paid tool, then Scrapebox is a useful tool. Aside from having a keyword research module, it can also do other analysis like see what sites are linked to a web page or how many social media shares a page has.
It’s essentially an all purpose SEO tool for under $100.
If you want to succeed with blogging or any kind of online writing, then keyword research is a must. And if you want to play around with some more tools, then check out this post with over 90 keyword research tools and ideas:
http://www.smallbusinessideasblog.com/keyword-research-tools
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Brian Lang has been in business for over 10 years and runs Small Business Ideas Blog where he shares tips about business and online marketing. Check out his site for more tips and ideas about blogging, SEO, and running a business.