How to Choose SEO Keywords for Your Business Blog

Is your blog a ghost town? 👻 Learn how to find keywords that bring in more readers (with free or paid tools!).

Is your business blog feeling like a ghost town? Are you creating amazing content that nobody seems to be reading? Yep—it happens to the best of us!

If you’re struggling to get your blogs found online, the problem is probably your keyword strategy (or lack thereof)!

Keep reading this post to learn how to find and choose SEO keywords for your business blog (using free and paid tools for any budget!).

By the end, you’ll know exactly which keywords you should target to make the biggest impact for your business. And you’ll have a finished content calendar that will show you exactly what blog posts to write week after week.

This will work for you even if you haven’t started your blog yet. You’ll be able to build a strong foundation that can help you rank faster with more strategic content.

Now, if you’re new to SEO, start with my article about the basics of SEO to get up to speed first. Then come back here to start picking out your keywords.

Let’s get started.

How to Choose SEO Keywords for Your Business Blog

I’m going to walk you through the steps of choosing and evaluating keywords.

For most of the steps, you’ll need to use some research or organization tools. I’ll share both paid and free options. Paid options make your life easier, but I understand that not all businesses can justify the budget at this stage! I gotchu 😉

Pre-Work: Find Your Website’s Domain Authority Score

The first step is to understand your domain authority, which will help you figure out how likely you are to rank for difficult keywords.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain authority is a number from 0 to 100 that estimates how authoritative your website is from Google’s perspective. 

This is not an official number from Google—it’s just a “guesstimate” made by SEO software programs like Ahrefs and Semrush. And numbers will vary depending on which software you use.

How to Find Your Domain Authority Score

For now, pop your domain into Ahrefs’ free Website Authority Checker and see what number it gives you.

If you have a paid Ahrefs account, you can use the Site Explorer feature to see more details about your site, including your domain authority score.

Your number might be 30 or lower if you haven’t worked on your SEO yet. That’s okay!

My domain authority for this brand-new website is basically zero.

How Domain Authority is Calculated

Authoritative websites like Wikipedia and YouTube score at the top of the 100-point scale, and everything else is relative.

Ahrefs calculates this by seeing how many websites link to your site and, among them, how many authoritative sites link to you.

If you’re curious about how many websites are linking to you, you can also use Ahref’s free Backlink Checker (or paid Site Explorer feature) to find that information.

Some backlinks I have. The first one is from a comment I wrote and the second is spam.

Write Down Your Domain Authority Score

But again, your domain authority score is just an estimate. It can help you make better decisions about what keywords to focus on. But it’s not the “gospel truth.” *Cue Hercules song*

For now, take note of your domain authority number so you can use it when we’re looking at keyword ideas later.

Step #1 - Brainstorm Keyword Ideas

Next, it’s time to brainstorm a big list of keyword ideas. 

You don’t need to worry about how good the keywords are, just write down whatever you can find. We’ll evaluate them in the next step.

Seed Keywords vs Long-Tail Keywords

For this step, it’s important to understand the difference between seed keywords and long-tail keywords.

Seed keywords are the most simple keywords that refer to your large, overarching topics. These should correlate with the things that you sell or offer as a business or organization.

You may have multiple seed keywords depending on the number of topics you want to cover in your blog. Examples of seed keywords are “exercise,” “refrigerators,” or “child care.”

Seed keywords are important because they help you organize your keywords by topic and help you think of more keyword ideas. But since they’re very generic, it’s going to be extremely hard to rank for them.

Ultimately, you will probably turn these into website pages where you link all of your blog posts under that topic. But for now, they will help you organize your keywords into groups.

Long-tail keywords are the more specific keywords that fall under each of these topics. 

For example, under the “exercise” seed keyword, you’ll find long-tail keywords like “types of exercise,” “exercises to do in the office,” or “low-intensity exercise for bad knees.” Generally speaking, the more specific the keyword, the easier it is to rank. That’s because there’s less competition and less search volume.

How to Find Real Keywords People are Searching For

Keywords can’t be whatever you want them to be. They must be what your target customers are actually typing into the search bar.

If you have a paid Ahrefs account, it’s easy to use the Keywords Explorer feature to find keyword ideas, plus important metrics like how many people are searching for this every month. You can also use the Site Explorer tool to look at your competitors and what keywords they’re ranking for already.

Or choose a more affordable alternative like Keywords Everywhere.

Free Tools for Finding Keyword Ideas

If you want to go the free way, here are some things you can do:

• Talk to your customers and ask what they would type in, then check those ideas in Google Search
• Use your own experience of searching and try to come up with ideas, then check those ideas in Google Search 
• Use Ahrefs’ free Keyword Generator tool
• Look at your competitors and try to figure out what keywords they’re targeting

When using Google Search to look at keyword ideas, you can use 3 free tools to find more details.

First, there’s the autocomplete bar:

Then there are the little bubbles at the top that Google sometimes includes:

And finally, you can look at the People also search for section:

Use Modifiers to Find More Keyword Ideas

Whether you’re using free or paid tools, you can use modifiers like these with your seed keyword to find more keyword ideas:

• vs
• best
• top
• review
• what
• when
• where
• why
• how
• guide
• ideas
• tips
• examples

Pro Tip: Try searching for your topic plus each letter of the alphabet to find more keyword ideas.

For example, typing “exercise d” came up with these ideas:

Just Make a List For Now

At this stage, you’ll have a list of keyword ideas with no organization whatsoever. That’s okay!

In the next step, we’ll organize them into groups. Then we’ll figure out which ones are worth targeting (and which should be ignored).

Step #2 - Organize Keywords into Topic Clusters

The better you organize your keywords, the easier it will be to create content around them.

This can actually help you structure your website in a better way, so Google can understand your content more easily. So it’s worth taking the time now to get organized!

A topic cluster is the name for a collection of keywords that all fall under a certain category. So if your seed keyword is “exercise”, all your exercise-related content like “how to exercise during pregnancy” and “exercises to do at home” will be one topic cluster.

(These are also called keyword clusters.)

So how do you organize your content into topic clusters? You want to create what’s called a topical map. I like to do this with mind-mapping software to make it easy.

The main idea is to start from the most basic level topics then break those down into sub-topics. Then break sub-topics into sub-topics, until you have a good picture of how your content topic breaks down.

Let’s go back to the seed keyword exercise. Under this topic, you may have sub-topics like “types of exercise” and “exercise routines” for example. Then you would break them down into more sub-topics.

Here’s the beginning of a topical map I created in MindNode:

You can see the main categories of the blog and how they break down into sub-categories and longer-tail keywords.

A Rough Idea is Fine

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but if you have your keywords organized roughly into a tree like this, with the broader keywords at the top and more specific keywords at the edges, you can more easily structure your content.

This will come into play when you’re organizing your website structure and when you start adding internal links between blog posts. That’s more than I can cover in this post, but just know that it will help you later on, so it’s good to take this step now.

But if this sounds overwhelming, you can skip this for now and do it later.

Tools to Use to Create Your Topic Clusters

You can use Google Sheets to create a basic topic map, like the one below:

Image Source: Keyword Clusterizer

Or you can create mind maps using apps like MindNode on Mac, Miro or MindMup online, which offer both free and paid plans. (I personally find MindNode easiest to use.)

Project management tools like ClickUp often have mind-mapping tools, too, so you might be able to use a tool you already have.

Step #3 - Evaluate Keywords

Okay, so now you have a random big list of keywords and you have no idea where to start.

Now it’s time to go through the list and evaluate each one. I’m going to share several metrics that you should look at, and (as always) how to do this with paid and free tools.

We’re going to look at:

• Search Volume
• Keyword Difficulty
• Search Intent
• Urgency
• Your Level of Expertise
• Business Potential
• Commercial Value
• Conversion Value

And don’t worry, I’ll give you a little formula at the end. Plug these numbers in, and you’ll get a handy little score for each keyword that will help you figure out which ones are higher priority.

At this point, you’ll want to put your keywords into a spreadsheet or table-friendly software like AirTable, Notion, ClickUp, etc. You’ll want to make one column for each of these metrics so you can fill them in as you go.

Save some time with my free template: I made you a free Blog Keyword Planner spreadsheet that you can use as you go through this guide (no email required to download).

The Blog Keyword Planner has space for all of these metrics and an explanation of each.

Search Volume

First, we need to consider search volume. This is the average number of times that people search for this keyword in a given month.

If your keyword has a search volume of 25k, that’s 25,000 potential visits you could bring to your site by dominating the keyword. (Of course, most of the time you’ll get a percentage of that traffic, not all of it.)

But if it has a search volume of 100, even ranking at #1 will only bring in potentially 100 visits from that keyword.

It’s good to have a mix of high-volume and low-volume keywords. And by the way, high-volume keywords usually also have a high keyword difficulty, which makes it harder to rank. So don’t be quick to discard a keyword just because it has a low search volume.

How to Find Search Volume for Your Keywords:

If using Ahrefs’ paid tool, click into Keywords Explorer and search for your keyword. It’ll bring you to an overview page, which will show you the Search Volume in your country of focus, plus global search volume for the keyword.

A free tool that could work is the WordStream Free Keyword Tool. Type in your keyword of choice, and it’ll bring up 25 related keywords with search volume included.

The search volume here is a lot higher than Ahrefs (Ahrefs generally tends to be more accurate), so this should only be taken as a (very) rough estimate.

Another option is Ahrefs’ free Keyword Generator, which gives you a rough estimate for your keyword and a list of related keywords to consider.

For now, put the Search Volume number (whatever you have) into your table for each keyword.

Keyword Difficulty

The next metric to track is keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty (which we call KD for short) is a score that tells you how difficult it is to rank for that keyword. The range is between 0 and 100.

You could rank quickly for low-KD keywords without a high Domain Authority or many links from other sites. (Learn why links are important in my guide to SEO.)

But the higher the KD score, the more authoritative your website needs to be (in Google’s eyes) to rank.

So if you’re brand-new to this, you’ll probably only be able to rank for keywords with 0 to 5 difficulty.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write content for more difficult keywords now. It just means you should have the right expectations for those keywords. It will take a lot more time and effort to actually rank for them.

How to Find Keyword Difficulty Scores

In Ahrefs (and similar tools like Semrush), you’ll find the KD score on the Keyword Overview that we talked about in the last section. Keyword Difficulty is on the far left.

“Types of exercise” has a really high DR of 55, which means there’s tons of competition for it. You probably won’t rank for this without a serious SEO strategy and a lot of time.

A free alternative is Ahrefs’ free Keyword Difficulty Checker. I searched for the same keyword and got this:

For now, add the KD for each keyword in your list.

Search Intent

Next, you’ll want to understand the search intent for the keyword. And luckily, this is something you can do for free.

What you’ll do is search for the keyword in Google Search, and look at:

• What kind of pages are ranking in the top 10
• What those pages are about

This will help you understand what searchers are actually looking for when they type in this keyword. 

You might look at a keyword like “refrigerator” and think, “Oh, I can write about refrigerator technology.” But if you look at the search intent for “refrigerator,” people are actually just looking to buy a refrigerator. (All the top-ranking articles are product pages.) So your article about refrigerator technology won’t have a chance of ranking for this.

Questions to Ask to Discover Search Intent

So when looking for search intent, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Are the top-ranking pages mostly blog posts? Or are they something else, like landing pages, product pages, or product category pages?
• What are the pages actually about? What angle is each one focusing on?

You can jot down a quick summary for this under your “Search Intent” column.

Basically, if the top-ranking pages are NOT blog posts, you shouldn’t be writing a blog post for them (or at least, if you do, know that you won’t rank for it). You can safely cross these off from your blog keywords list, or at least clearly mark them so you know they’re not for your blog. (They may work as other pages on your site, though!)

Also, if the search intent is something totally different from your industry or expertise, you might not want to write about that keyword, either.

Urgency

The next metric I like to track is the urgency of the keyword. Sometimes you want to create content around a keyword more quickly because you are about to launch a product, or you know that it’s an up-and-coming topic that you want to jump on before everybody starts writing about it.

I rate Urgency on a scale of 1 to 3:

• 1: Could write this anytime, doesn’t really matter
• 2: Better sooner than later, but it’s flexible
• 3: We need to get this going ASAP

Put this number in the Urgency column for now.

Expertise Level

Next up is your expertise level for the keyword. This means, do you have first-person, real-life experience in the topic you’d be writing about? Or is it something you’d have to research and learn more about before writing? All of this can factor into how easy it is to rank.

This has to do with the search intent for the keyword. You are rating your expertise in the topics that come up for that specific keyword.

I rate Expertise on a scale of 1 to 3:

• 1: This isn’t really even in our line of work, we’d have to do lots of research
• 2: It’s part of our industry but we don’t have personal experience, we could consult another expert or do research
• 3: We have first-hand personal experience of this and can write about it as an expert

Mark this number into the Expertise column for each keyword.

Business Potential

Next I like to write out the Business Potential for each keyword. I’ll explain what that is.

Sometimes you have a good keyword and you have experience with the topic, but you know the people searching for it aren’t going to be interested in your products or services.

It comes down to the product-keyword fit. In other words, how well does the keyword tie into your own products and services?

For example, my client in the crafting space is an expert in sublimation printing. With sublimation printing, you can make t-shirts, tumblers, and all kinds of things. But my client doesn’t sell t-shirts. They sell tumblers.

So we haven’t written many articles about “sublimation on t-shirts” because we know that we don’t have many products to promote for that topic. That doesn’t mean we won’t write about them in the future, but they are not the priority for now.

I rate Business Potential on a scale of 1 to 3:

• 1: This really doesn’t tie back to any of our paid offers at all—the searchers don’t match our customer profile
• 2: We could promote some offers, or loosely relate it back to our offers, so not all is lost—the searchers could still be potential customers in the future
• 3: This perfectly aligns with things we are trying to sell—these people match our customer persona

Put this score into the Business Potential column in your table. Again, just because it doesn’t match your customer persona doesn’t mean it’s not worth writing about. But this will help you to prioritize the more value-heavy keywords first.

Commercial Value

Next, you want to score the keyword on its Commercial Value. In other words, is the search intent more informational or commercial?

A search for “how to stain your deck” is informational intent. These people are trying to solve a problem, but they might not be ready to buy any deck stain just yet.

But a search for “best dark deck stain” means that they’re ready to buy. That’s commercial intent.

I score Commercial Value on a scale from 1 to 3.

• 1: This is purely informational—they’re looking to solve a problem or find ideas still
• 2: They’re on the journey to buy—they might be researching different options or comparing them
• 3: They’re ready to buy—searching for reviews, “best XYZ” articles, etc.

Mark down this score in the Commercial Value column of your table.

Conversion Value

Finally, we have the conversion value to consider. This is the rough dollar value of each conversion that you hope to receive through the article or because of the article.

For example, one article may promote a $5 product, while another promotes a $1000 product. Or the article may promote a free webinar where an average conversion will make you $5000. Or one new lead may be worth $500 for you for example.

If you have two keywords, each with the same search volume and difficulty, but one is tied to a $5 product while the other is tied to a $1000 product, I would start with the article for the $1000 product.

This dollar value is totally arbitrary but it will help you discern between articles that will turn into more profit versus others, all other things being equal.

Of course, use your own currency for this. Enter the monetary value into your Conversion Value column. You might need to leave notes in a comment or in another column to remind yourself what that dollar value stands for.

Keeping Track of It All

Okay, that’s a lot of stuff to keep track of for every keyword. 

Of course, once you understand that the search intent is wrong for your business or the product-keyword fit isn’t there, you can delete the keyword from your list entirely.

Don’t worry about filling out all of these columns if you’re not planning to go after that keyword anyway.

Next, I’ll show you how to use these scores to figure out your most high-priority keywords.

Step #4 - Organize Potential Keywords by Priority

Going through that list, cross out any keywords where blog posts aren’t ranking or it doesn’t feel like a good fit for your business. 

Look at the balance of keyword difficulty versus the importance of that keyword for your business to have a complete picture of content for your audience.

I believe that you should always write those “101 articles”—the basic info that your customer wants to know to do business with you. Even if you don’t rank for those keywords, they will still be valuable to have on your site.

But you should have a higher ratio of low KD keywords if you want to see results more quickly. The more traffic you get, the more you can build up your DR and start ranking for more keywords.

I have a formula I use to calculate each posts’ Post Value Score. It basically takes into account all of these metrics and spits out a rough score that shows you which keywords are going to be most valuable for your business (from an SEO standpoint).

I can’t vouch for the accuracy, but it’s helped me to make faster decisions using quick math. You can tweak it for your own uses. And let me know if you have any suggestions to make it better! 

This would work in Google Sheets or in a Formula field in AirTable, Notion, ClickUp, and more. (I’ve included in the Blog Keyword Planner already.)

The formula is:

(Volume / (KD+1) / 10) * Urgency Score * Client Expertise Score * Business Value Score * Commercial Value Score * ((Value of Product / 1000)+1)

Round up the total to the nearest full number. You might need to adjust if you are getting too high or too low scores, especially depending on your average product value or lead value.

This isn’t something to be followed blindly. 

If you know you need to cover a certain topic on your blog because your customer needs to know it, then it’s worth covering that topic first, even if it’s not going to rank for a long time. Or if a certain keyword is very urgent for you, it’s worth making that content now so it has time to start growing.

You can still look at individual metrics and make your own decisions. Above all, remember that a high Keyword Difficulty (anything over 5 or 10 if you’re just starting out) is going to be very hard to rank for at the beginning.

Step #5 - Create a Content Calendar

Finally, you’ll take your list of keywords organized by priority and put them into a content calendar.

This is the actual posting schedule you create for yourself, with publish dates for each post.

You might choose to publish 1 post a week or even more if you can manage it. One post a week is pretty standard if you’re just starting out.

You can start by covering the most basic topics that a customer would need to know when learning about your business. (This helps your website have a good foundation of content at the start.) Then, go in order from your most high-potential keyword.

Pro Tip: It’s best to stick to one topic cluster at a time if you’re trying to get ranked faster. Google wants to see that you’re an authority in your subject. So if you build up a collection of content around that topic first, you’ll have a better chance of being seen as an expert in that topic.

Once you have your content calendar in place, it’s time to start writing! Use my SEO keyword research process to plan out each blog post based on your keyword, and then find out how to write a blog post in less time.

How Long Will It Take for My Content to Rank?

There is no answer for this! (Fire any agency that promises you a time frame—you’ll thank me later…)

If you already have clear authority in your topic, it may be faster for your blog posts to rank for certain keywords. Or if your industry isn’t crowded yet, and there isn’t much good content out there, your content could rise to the top.

But as with most things, SEO strategies take time and consistency to bear fruit. If you commit to this process, and if you keep creating good content for your customers and potential customers, you’ll eventually start to see good traffic coming into your most helpful posts.

Even before you see organic traffic coming in through search engines, you can share these to your company’s social media pages, give them directly to customers, send them through your mailing list, and run paid ads to your most important posts.

Good and helpful content will be recognized, and if you’re really writing helpful stuff, people will naturally start sharing your content with others.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it! Let’s get rid of those tumbleweeds rolling through your business blog by creating a solid keyword strategy.

I showed you both free and paid tools, but if you really want to save time and make this a fast process, Ahrefs is the way to go. 

You can use Ahrefs with their Starter plan for just $29 a month at the time of writing! To me, this is a worthy investment to save hours of research and just simply get better numbers for your blog strategy. Targeting the right keywords will get the right eyeballs on your content and increase your revenue overall. All that for $29 a month? I think that’s a steal.

I’m not affiliated, and sharing this link doesn’t get me anything, but click here to check out the current pricing and plans for Ahrefs.

Now it’s time to put this knowledge into action. Grab my free Blog Keyword Planner spreadsheet where you can start plugging in your keywords and metrics and calculating your Post Value Score for each (no email required).