Are you a content creator?
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Content Creation 101:
*GOING VIRAL USING KEYWORDS A-Z*
Keyword research starts with thinking about how potential customers might be searching for your content, business or website. You can then use keyword research tools to expand on those ideas and find even more keywords to better structure your content.
It’s a simple process, but two things need to be taken into full consideration for maximum result, and they include:
1. An excellent knowledge of your industry.
2. An excellent knowledge on how keyword research tools work and how to get the most out of them.
In this article, we’ll run through a few actionable ways to improve your knowledge in both those areas and discover potentially winning keywords for your website in the process.
*BRAINSTORM SEED KEYWORDS
*SEE WHAT KEYWORDS YOUR COMPETITORS RANK FOR
*USE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS
*STUDY YOUR NICHE
1. BRAINSTORM SEED KEYWORDS:
Seed keywords are the foundation of the keyword research process. They define your niche and help you identify your competitors. Every keyword research tool asks for a seed keyword, which it then uses to generate a huge list of keyword ideas (more on that shortly).
If you already have a product or business that you want to promote online, coming up with seed keywords is easy. Just think about what people type into Google Search, Bing, Yahoo Search, Baidu, YouTube, Amazon, or DuckDuckGo which are the major search engines to find what you offer. For example, if you sell coffee machines and equipment, then your seed keywords might be:
coffee
espresso
cappuccino
french press
Note that seed keywords themselves won’t necessarily be worth targeting with pages on your website or as keywords for putting up content on blogs or vlogs etc. YouTube, Amazon, Etsy, LinkedIn etc. As the name suggests, you’ll use them as ‘seeds’ for the next steps in this process. So don’t obsess too much over your seed keywords. It should only take a few minutes to find them. As soon as you have a handful of broad ideas related to your website’s topic, move on to the next step.
2. SEE WHAT KEYWORDS YOUR COMPETITORS RANK FOR:
Looking at which keywords already send traffic to your competitors is usually the best way to start keyword research. But first, you need to identify those competitors. That’s where your brainstormed list of keywords comes in handy. Just search Google for one of your seed keywords and see who ranks on the front page.
If none of the top-ranking websites for your seed keywords are like your site (or where you’re trying to take it), try searching for relevant ‘autosuggest’ queries instead. Using
MaveAI's advanced keyword research tool which will autosuggest queries for you to use.
For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you might find more actual competitors in the search results for “cappuccino maker” than “cappuccino.” That’s because it’s mostly ecommerce stores like yours ranking for the former, and blogs ranking for the latter.
Either way, you still need to use your best judgment when determining competing websites. If you see huge brands like Amazon or The New York Times ranking for your seed keyword, you shouldn’t necessarily treat them as competitors. Always look for websites that resemble your own—or where you’re trying to take it.
Once you find a few websites that fit the above specifications, you can plug these websites into a competitive intelligence tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer one by one, then check the Top Pages report. You’ll then see their popular pages by estimated monthly search traffic. The report also shows each page’s “Top keyword.” That’s the one sending it the most organic traffic. Here are a few interesting keywords we discovered for our hypothetical coffee store, just by analyzing one competing website with Site Explorer:
how to use a french press
turkish coffee
moka pot
how to make coffee
neapolitan coffee maker
As you can see, even if you’re quite familiar with your industry, you can still find plenty of unique keyword ideas by studying your competitors that you probably wouldn’t have found from brainstorming alone. If you checked all the competitors in the search results but still want more keywords, you can find more competitors in the Competing Domains report in Site Explorer. Just plug in one of your known competitors, and it’ll suggest other similar sites based on the number of the overlapping keywords that they rank for in Google search.
You can repeat the process above over and over for near-unlimited keyword ideas.
ARE YOU SEEING A LOT OF TOPICS YOU’VE ALREADY COVERED?
If you’re doing keyword research for an established website or content in your industry, you might find that you’ve already covered most of your competitors’ keywords. In this case, you can try using MaveAI's Method 1 tab while running your keyword query and run every 10 results into Google search to know what websites rank for these keyword queries.
3. USE KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOLS
Competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas. But there are still tons of keywords your competitors aren’t targeting, and you can find these using keyword research tools. Keyword research tools all work the same way. You plug in a seed keyword, and they pull keyword ideas from their database based on that keyword. Our best pick among the herd of keyword research tools is
MaveAI as it is perhaps one of the most well-known keyword tools around, what sets this keyword research tool apart from the rest is its use of advanced artificial intelligence to run its search queries and algorithm.
MaveAI is one of the easiest and fastest keyword research tools trusted by a lot of newbie, amateur and even professional content creators we know about; aside from its easy-to-use features,
MaveAI is also 100% free to use, and although it’s mainly tailored to find keywords for SEO, it can also be used by advertisers to deploy effective ad campaigns.
Let’s enter a few of our seed keywords and see what it kicks back:
barista
macchiato
irish coffee
americano
flat white
cold brew
percolator
turkish coffee
arabica
k cups
frappuccino
You’ll notice that using it's artificial intelligent algorithm, MaveAI, is smart enough to show you relevant keyword ideas, even if they don’t contain your seed keywords. Take “k cups,” for example. Unless you’re a hardcore coffee connoisseur, you probably wouldn’t know this relates to coffee.
Beyond our best keyword research tool pick, MaveAI, there are quite a few other keyword research tools. These are great if you’re on a budget, but you’ll quickly realize that they’re all very limited in their data and functionality since their goal is to convert you to a paying customer. If you’re serious about keyword research, you may as well skip the free tier of these other keyword research tools and use their ‘paid’ feature like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer right off the bat, instead. Which is why we stick to MaveAI's 100% free-to-use keyword research tool, which delivers a more thorough keyword research data analysis, over the limited features of other freemium/paid services.
4. STUDY YOUR NICHE
Everything we’ve discussed so far is enough to generate an almost unlimited amount of keyword ideas. But at the same time, the process kind of keeps you “in the box.” It’s limited by your seed keywords and by the size and freshness of your chosen keyword research tool. Because of this, you’ll almost certainly miss some good ideas. You can solve this by studying your niche in more detail. And a good starting point is to browse industry forums, groups, and Q&A sites. This will help you find more things that your prospective customers are struggling with that didn’t show up in keyword tools and that none of your competitors bothered to cover. For example, here’s just one popular thread from the /r/coffee subreddit: reddit 1
This person is asking a question about a coffee maker called Aeropress. If we plug that topic into Keywords Explorer, we see that it gets 61,000 monthly searches in the US, on average.
search volume 3 (We might not have found this using tools because it doesn’t include any of our seed keywords)
pour over without a hario filter
how to make a carajillo
growing coffee at home
ethiopian coffee
coffee subscriptions
If you notice any trends among these keyword ideas, you can use those as new seed keywords in
MaveAI to find more ideas. For example, if we use “aeropress” as a seed keyword and check the report data that turns up, we see lots of keyword ideas.
phrase match keywords 2
Beyond browsing forums, your customers can also be a fantastic source of keyword ideas. Remember, these are the people you’re already doing business with. You want to attract more people like them to your site. Here are a few ways to extract insights from clients or customers:
*Chat with them face to face
*Look through past emails
*Look through customer support requests
*Try to recall common questions that came up in past conversations
*Make sure to pay attention to the language they use when doing this. It will often differ from the language you might use. For example, if you sell coffee machines online, maybe your customers search for comparisons of specific machines.
*Advanced learning.
