I know it is not easy to remember to do keyword research: I used to often miss that step too until I made keyword research part of my content creation routine. Here’s how:

1. Come up with Content Ideas

This is the most straightforward goal of keyword research: To expand your core term to hopefully find lots of ideas to create content around.

The point is, keyword research is based on the searching behavior of the search engine user: They type in the search box what they are most interested in. Hence, their searching behavior reflects the demand for content in your industry. And the keyword competition reflects the offer.

I have described the quick, yet effective keyword research exercise here. In short, using the tool like Serpstat, you need to find keyword phrases with high search volume (= high demand) and low competition (= low offer) – there’s your sweet spot and a chance to create content that resonates due to a popular demand and ranks high due to a low competition.

Let’s say chocolate is what you are thinking to write about, so here would be your lower-competition phrases that offer pretty exciting content ideas:

You can use Google Keyword Planner to perform a similar task. This one goes back to the scope of adwords. You’ll need an active Adwords account to access the data though.

You can carefully research different keywords and find the highest rate of success likely for your site, and the results of others that you have to compete against. It is a great way to get a solid projection of keyword results before even launching a campaign. And a way to see how you are already doing, so you can constantly monitor. Here are more tools to use for keyword research and brainstorming.

RECOMMENDED: 10 Ways to Bring More Readers BACK to Your Blog

2. Come up with the Follow-up Ideas for Your Old Content

Digging further into the keyword suggestions, you’ll find more and more phrases which you may have partially covered. In this case, writing a follow-up article to bring up your old content by linking to it may be a good option.

You can also come up with content ideas by seeing what other keyword opportunities your current content is missing. For example, take your page about coffee calories and click to “Missing keywords“: This will bring up the list of phrases that your page competitors rank high but your page is nowhere to be found. Now look at how high competition is and whether some of the keywords warrant a follow-up:

3. Create Content Outlines

After the above two steps, you are likely to have a few content ideas to work on in the future. Don’t stop there. Keyword research can help structure each of your articles giving you an idea of what sections to break each article into.

Research questions containing your chosen keyword phrase, those questions people tend to type into Google search box. Serpstat can help there:

There’s another tool called Answer the Public that can help with question research.

Here’s the partial close-up for you to get a better idea:

The two tools generate different results, so you should probably use both. Good news is, the two features are free. You can also export results to Excel to keep playing.

So if you were to write about calories in coffee, these questions may make up the sections of your article:

• where do calories in coffee come from
• how many calories are in coffee beans
• are there calories in decaf coffee
• how many calories are in coffee with milk and sugar
• are there calories in instant coffee
• are there calories in flavored coffee

As you can see, it’s going to be a pretty in-depth read! Don’t just create content, create cornerstone content.

Tip: You can actually rank for these terms in Google: Create a table of contents for each section of your article to have a separate “Jump to” link down to each section. This will also make your article easier to navigate between the sections and will drive more people in. Use this plugin to generate a clickable table of contents for each of your articles.

You can also organize your clickable “Jump-to” link in tabs. Here’s a good example of how that’s implemented:

4. Pile up Content Ideas for the Future

A thorough keyword research may take a few hours but it doesn’t mean you are supposed to come out with one solid article idea. You’ll actually get plenty. You may come up with a year-worth editorial calendar.

In order not to waste that huge effort, make sure you are organizing your content ideas properly.

Trello is a great tool for that. I’ve been using it successfully to manage content ideas spread among multiple authors:

Simply create a new card for every article idea and put the card into the “Idea” column. Once you start working on it, move it to production and once it’s ready, move it to “To be posted”. You can keep your outline for each article inside each card.

You can use it similarly to store and organize your own ideas if you own a single-author blog. You can even assign dates for Trello to remind you that you were going to write an article. Here’s another way to store content ideas for better writing productivity, especially if you want contributors to help you write content.

How do you use keyword research ideas for content inspiration? Please share in the comments.

The post How to Use Keyword Research in Your Content Marketing appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

On this episode of 

Rich Brooks is founder and president of flyte new media, a web design and marketing firm in Portland, Maine. He is a nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and social media.

Rich is currently an Expert Blogger at FastCompany.com and a regular contributor at SocialMediaExaminer.com. Rich is a founder of The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference, an annual conference on search, social and mobile marketing.

He runs The Marketing Agents Podcast, where he interviews marketing experts from around the world on search, social and mobile marketing.  

On the Hangout Rich and I discuss:

• How to discover which keywords your ideal customers are looking for
• How to place them strategically on your site for maximum impact
• How to use them for blog posts and YouTube videos to increase your reach
• How to drive people to your site for improved conversions

Check out the Event page for comments, questions and photos. 
(Timestamps are included on theYouTube page for the video.)

Resources Rich mentioned on the show:

Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath 
Google Keyword Planner 
Google Trends 
Moz Open Site Explorer (link search tool)

Connect with Rich:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/therichbrooks
Website: http://www.takeflyte.com
Agents of Change Conference
Marketing Agents Podcast

For your convenience, below is the mp3 and the transcript from the live Hangout with Rich. 

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The post How to Boost Your Visibility with SEO – Adventures in Visibility with Rich Brooks appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

Keyword research is a great way for you to discover potential content ideas for your website. Very often, blog owners either don't know the right phrases to be targeting or they target the wrong keyword. Great headlines, great content and a great message all sound, well, great but if nobody is finding your blog then you're talking to yourself. Furthermore, your efforts are all going out the window. This is where doing a bit of research can go a long way. Search traffic will keep coming long after you had published the post.

Free Keyword Search  Video

In order to demonstrate, below is a short screencast on how to search for targetable keywords. The focus of this video is to identify keyword phrases using Google's free keyword search tool and then hone down the phrases in order to end up with a phrase that is less competitive.

(Can't see the video? To watch on YouTube, click here.)

A Word of Caution

The video above is just the start of the process. There are additional factors that you should consider when you are carrying out your phrase research. You will also need to make sure that you take a look at the strength of your competition and not just the number of competitors. You want to be racing against weekend warriors and not Olympic athletes.

For example:

• Page Rank: The overall page strength assigned by Google. If the first 10 results are full of PR3 and above, you should probably head back to the drawing board.
• On Page Optimization: Is the page ranking high in Google just because of low competition or has it been optimized to do so.
• Backlinks: The amount of other pages already linking to the competition's sites. Is it hundreds of links or thousands of links?

Website Keyword Research Tools

Additionally, you might want to look at a few more tools. The following tools will help you to analyze your competition better.

I am a big fan of the browser Chrome and it is available for Mac, Windows and Linux computers. The SEO Quake extension for Chrome will give you many details about your competition. You will even get more information than you need. SEO Quake is also available for other browsers but I haven't had the chance to test them.

Do you spend much time researching your blog posts? Do you have any tips or tools for that you like to use for doing this type of research?

About the Author: Matthew Hooper helps individuals, small businesses and organizations build an internet presence. Don’t forget to get his free report on building an internet presence. You can also check out his WordPress Course full of step-by-step videos so that you can learn WordPress in a single weekend.

The post Free Keyword Search Tips for Bloggers appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.