If you’ve looked to start a blog or begun building an affiliate marketing business, you’ve probably come across the term “keyword”.
But just what exactly is a keyword in blogging?
And what is meant by keyword research?
We’ve put this blog post together to help you understand exactly what those terms mean & to explain how both keywords & keyword research can help you make money.
So if those are some of the things you’ve been wondering about, keep reading to find out everything you need to know.
What Is A Keyword?
In short, a keyword in blogging refers to the search query that the blog post is intended to target & ultimately, rank for in search engines.
After all, the primary goal of most blogs is to generate traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing so that you can earn money by promoting products or services.
So, for example, let’s say your niche is robot vacuums.
Some search queries related to robot vacuums could include:
And those are all referred to as keywords.
So, in order to get traffic to your blog from search engines, what you would do is simply pick one of those keywords & create a blog post targeting it.
For example, you could pick “do robot vacuums work on carpet” & write an entire blog post around that specific keyword.
If you write it high-quality & helpful enough, that blog post could then appear in the search results when people search for that keyword.
And as soon as people start clicking on it, you could start making money.
As you can see, the process of earning money like this is pretty simple & if you’re interested in learning more about it, you could sign up for our free course.
Is A Keyword Only One Word?
No, despite its name a keyword isn’t only one word. A keyword can be one word or multiple words but typically between 2 & 80 characters, with a maximum of 10 words.
Generally, the fewer the words (and characters), the more competitive they keyword will be, meaning the more difficult it will be to rank for it.
Whilst a longer keyword, known as a long-tail keyword, generally has much lower competition & therefore is often much easier to rank for.
However, that doesn’t mean you should always use long-tails because whilst they may have lower competition, they usually have lower search volume too.
This means fewer people searching for it.
So you’d have to get more long-tails ranked to generate the same amount of traffic as you would by ranking a few high search volume short keywords.
But if your blog is new or only has a little bit of content, search engines will be wary about ranking your blog posts for high volume keyword.
That’s why we always recommend leveraging a gradual approach.
Start with really low competition, low search volume long-tails to begin with & then gradually work your way up, increasing the volume you’re targeting bit by bit as they start to rank.
Then, once your blog has gained enough authority & trust with the search engines, you can try some high competition keywords & you’ll stand a much better chance of ranking.
This brings me to the next point.
How Do You Write Keywords In A Blog?
Back in the day, when search engines were quite basic, you’d have to physically include your keyword in your blog post in order for it rank for that specific keyword.
The more often you mentioned, the more “weight” the keyword was given & the more chance it would rank.
That is, unless you went too far, then it would be classed as keyword stuffing & wouldn’t get ranked at all.
But times have changed, search engines have improved & nowadays you don’t even have to mention the exact keyword at all.
This is because search engines nowadays can understand the topic of the page by scanning the entire content to get an idea of what its about & what search queries it’s relevant for.
For example, let’s say that, once again, your keyword is “do robot vacuums work on carpet“.
Providing the content you write is specifically focused on that keyword it could still rank highly even if you don’t specifically include the phrase “do robot vacuums work on carpet” anywhere in the content.
This is thanks to something known as Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI for short.
But one thing you might be wondering now is how you actually come up with keyword ideas for blog posts, so let’s look at that next.
What Is Meant By Keyword Research?
Keyword research in blogging refers to finding queries that people are searching for in search engines so that you can create relevant content to target them.
More specifically, it involves finding keywords that are relevant to your niche, low competition & have the chance to yield you traffic (visitors) to your blog.
And there are many different ways that people carry out keyword research but the method that we teach at Commission Academy involves leveraging both Google Autosuggest & 3rd party tools.
For example, if you type in a seed keyword (something related to your niche) in Google, their Autosuggest will suggest a list of common searches related to it like so:
Straight away then, from that search, you have a list of keyword ideas. However, what you don’t have is the search volume or competition information.
And that’s where 3rd party tools come into play.
You can then load those keywords into 3rd party keyword research tools (such as Mangools – our favourite) to get more detailed information.
And here’s an example of what that might look like:
But with all of the keywords available, you might be wondering which ones are best.
We’ll take a look at that next.
What Are The Best Keywords For Blog Traffic?
The best keywords for blog traffic involve a combination of both long-tail keywords & high volume keywords, with gradual targeting from low to high volume.
So, what I mean by that, is that on a new blog, you should always start out with really low competition long-tail keywords to begin getting initial traffic.
Then, once you start getting traffic & the search engines begin to trust your website, you can start to go for slightly higher volume keywords.
From here, you would simply continue the approach until you’ve worked your way up to being able to rank for high volume keywords by create high-quality content & building solid trust with the search engines.
Furthermore, you should also always make sure that the keywords you search for are closely related to the niche topic of your blog.
For example, if your blog is about robot vacuums, you shouldn’t write content about mountain biking, even if the keyword looks to be good.
Always, always, always keep your keywords relevant to the topic of your website.
And one other thing you want to avoid is creating multiple pieces of content for keywords that are very similar to each other. This known as keyword cannibalization.
For example, let’s say you have the following keywords:
- “do robot vacuums work on carpet”
- “do robot vacuums work on thick carpet”
- “do robot vacuums work on rugs”
You wouldn’t want to create 3 separate blog posts targeting those because they are too similar & they would overlap each other. This means that search engines wouldn’t known which one to rank & when that happens, they tend to not rank either.
Instead, you would just target both keywords from 1 main blog post.
So, your blog could be titled: Do Robot Vacuums Work On Thick Carpet & Rugs?
But we explain way more about finding the best keywords & how many keywords blog posts should have in our free training course so if you haven’t yet done so, be sure to check it out.
The Bottom Line
Keywords is a word that essentially refers to the queries that people are searching for in search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing.
Generally, a keyword is between 2 & 80 characters long & up to a maximum of 10 words.
And by targeting keywords, you can get your content to show up in search engines & start getting visitors coming to your blog.
Best of all, as soon as that happens, you can start making money as an affiliate marketer.
So, hopefully this blog post has helped you better understand what keywords are in blogging & what is meant by keyword research.
If you happen to have any additional questions or comments, don’t hesitate to leave them below.
