{"id":10089,"date":"2023-04-16T17:05:09","date_gmt":"2023-04-16T16:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commission.academy\/blog\/?p=10089"},"modified":"2023-04-16T17:06:19","modified_gmt":"2023-04-16T16:06:19","slug":"what-is-a-keyword-in-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commission.academy\/blog\/what-is-a-keyword-in-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is a Keyword In Blogging & What Is Keyword Research?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you’ve looked to start a blog<\/a> or begun building an affiliate marketing business<\/a>, you’ve probably come across the term “keyword”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But just what exactly is a keyword in blogging?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what is meant by keyword research?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if those are some of the things you’ve been wondering about, keep reading to find out everything you need to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is A Keyword?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After all, the primary goal of most blogs is to generate traffic<\/a> from search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing so that you can earn money by promoting products or services<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, for example, let’s say your niche<\/a> is robot vacuums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some search queries related to robot vacuums could include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Search<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And those are all referred to as keywords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, you could pick “do robot vacuums work on carpet<\/em>” & write an entire blog post around that specific keyword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you write it high-quality & helpful enough, that blog post could then appear in the search results when people search for that keyword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as soon as people start clicking on it, you could start making money<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is A Keyword Only One Word?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst a longer keyword, known as a long-tail keyword, generally has much lower competition & therefore is often much easier to rank for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means fewer people searching for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s why we always recommend leveraging a gradual approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brings me to the next point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Do You Write Keywords In A Blog?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Back in the day, when search engines were quite basic, you’d have to physically include your keyword in your blog post<\/a> in order for it rank for that specific keyword.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more often you mentioned, the more “weight” the keyword was given & the more chance it would rank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is, unless you went too far, then it would be classed as keyword stuffing & wouldn’t get ranked at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But times have changed, search engines have improved & nowadays you don’t even have to mention the exact keyword at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, let’s say that, once again, your keyword is “do robot vacuums work on carpet<\/em>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>” anywhere in the content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is thanks to something known as Latent Semantic Indexing<\/a>, or LSI for short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is Meant By Keyword Research?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there are many different ways that people carry out keyword research but the method that we teach at Commission Academy<\/a> involves leveraging both Google Autosuggest & 3rd party tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Google<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Straight away then, from that search, you have a list of keyword ideas. However, what you don’t have is the search volume<\/a> or competition information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that’s where 3rd party tools come into play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can then load those keywords into 3rd party keyword research tools (such as Mangools<\/a> – our favourite) to get more detailed information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here’s an example of what that might look like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Keyword<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But with all of the keywords available, you might be wondering which ones are best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll take a look at that next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Are The Best Keywords For Blog Traffic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, once you start getting traffic & the search engines begin to trust your website, you can start to go for slightly higher volume keywords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, you should also always make sure that the keywords you search for are closely related to the niche topic<\/a> of your blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Always, always, always keep your keywords relevant to the topic of your website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, let’s say you have the following keywords:<\/p>\n\n\n\n