Is your blog a ghost town? đ» 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? Yepâit happens to the best of us!
If youâre 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, youâll know exactly which keywords you should target to make the biggest impact for your business. And youâll 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 havenât started your blog yet. Youâll be able to build a strong foundation that can help you rank faster with more strategic content.
Now, if youâre 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.
Letâs get started.
Iâm going to walk you through the steps of choosing and evaluating keywords.
For most of the steps, youâll need to use some research or organization tools. Iâll 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 đ
The first step is to understand your domain authority, which will help you figure out how likely you are to rank for difficult keywords.
Domain authority is a number from 0 to 100 that estimates how authoritative your website is from Googleâs perspective.
This is not an official number from Googleâitâs just a âguesstimateâ made by SEO software programs like Ahrefs and Semrush. And numbers will vary depending on which software you use.
For now, pop your domain into Ahrefsâ 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 havenât worked on your SEO yet. Thatâs okay!
My domain authority for this brand-new website is basically zero.
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 youâre curious about how many websites are linking to you, you can also use Ahrefâs 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.
But again, your domain authority score is just an estimate. It can help you make better decisions about what keywords to focus on. But itâs not the âgospel truth.â *Cue Hercules song*
For now, take note of your domain authority number so you can use it when weâre looking at keyword ideas later.
Next, itâs time to brainstorm a big list of keyword ideas.
You donât need to worry about how good the keywords are, just write down whatever you can find. Weâll evaluate them in the next step.
For this step, itâs 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 âexercise,â ârefrigerators,â or âchild care.â
Seed keywords are important because they help you organize your keywords by topic and help you think of more keyword ideas. But since theyâre very generic, itâs 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 âexerciseâ seed keyword, youâll find long-tail keywords like âtypes of exercise,â âexercises to do in the office,â or âlow-intensity exercise for bad knees.â Generally speaking, the more specific the keyword, the easier it is to rank. Thatâs because thereâs less competition and less search volume.
Keywords canât 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, itâs 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 theyâre ranking for already.
Or choose a more affordable alternative like Keywords Everywhere.
If you want to go the free way, here are some things you can do:
When using Google Search to look at keyword ideas, you can use 3 free tools to find more details.
First, thereâs 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:
Whether youâre using free or paid tools, you can use modifiers like these with your seed keyword to find more keyword ideas:
Pro Tip: Try searching for your topic plus each letter of the alphabet to find more keyword ideas.
For example, typing âexercise dâ came up with these ideas:
At this stage, youâll have a list of keyword ideas with no organization whatsoever. Thatâs okay!
In the next step, weâll organize them into groups. Then weâll figure out which ones are worth targeting (and which should be ignored).
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 itâs 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 âexerciseâ, all your exercise-related content like âhow to exercise during pregnancyâ and âexercises to do at homeâ 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 whatâs 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.
Letâs go back to the seed keyword exercise. Under this topic, you may have sub-topics like âtypes of exerciseâ and âexercise routinesâ for example. Then you would break them down into more sub-topics.
Hereâs 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.
It doesnât 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 youâre organizing your website structure and when you start adding internal links between blog posts. Thatâs more than I can cover in this post, but just know that it will help you later on, so itâs good to take this step now.
But if this sounds overwhelming, you can skip this for now and do it later.
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.
Okay, so now you have a random big list of keywords and you have no idea where to start.
Now itâs time to go through the list and evaluate each one. Iâm going to share several metrics that you should look at, and (as always) how to do this with paid and free tools.
Weâre going to look at:
And donât worry, Iâll give you a little formula at the end. Plug these numbers in, and youâll get a handy little score for each keyword that will help you figure out which ones are higher priority.
At this point, youâll want to put your keywords into a spreadsheet or table-friendly software like AirTable, Notion, ClickUp, etc. Youâll 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.
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, thatâs 25,000 potential visits you could bring to your site by dominating the keyword. (Of course, most of the time youâll 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.
Itâs 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 donât be quick to discard a keyword just because it has a low search volume.
How to Find Search Volume for Your Keywords:
If using Ahrefsâ paid tool, click into Keywords Explorer and search for your keyword. Itâll 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 itâll 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 Ahrefsâ 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.
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 Googleâs eyes) to rank.
So if youâre brand-new to this, youâll probably only be able to rank for keywords with 0 to 5 difficulty.
That doesnât mean you shouldnât 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), youâll find the KD score on the Keyword Overview that we talked about in the last section. Keyword Difficulty is on the far left.
âTypes of exerciseâ has a really high DR of 55, which means thereâs tons of competition for it. You probably wonât rank for this without a serious SEO strategy and a lot of time.
A free alternative is Ahrefsâ free Keyword Difficulty Checker. I searched for the same keyword and got this:
For now, add the KD for each keyword in your list.
Next, youâll want to understand the search intent for the keyword. And luckily, this is something you can do for free.
What youâll do is search for the keyword in Google Search, and look at:
This will help you understand what searchers are actually looking for when they type in this keyword.
You might look at a keyword like ârefrigeratorâ and think, âOh, I can write about refrigerator technology.â But if you look at the search intent for ârefrigerator,â people are actually just looking to buy a refrigerator. (All the top-ranking articles are product pages.) So your article about refrigerator technology wonât 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:
You can jot down a quick summary for this under your âSearch Intentâ column.
Basically, if the top-ranking pages are NOT blog posts, you shouldnât be writing a blog post for them (or at least, if you do, know that you wonât rank for it). You can safely cross these off from your blog keywords list, or at least clearly mark them so you know theyâre 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.
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 itâs 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:
Put this number in the Urgency column for now.
Next up is your expertise level for the keyword. This means, do you have first-person, real-life experience in the topic youâd be writing about? Or is it something youâd 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:
Mark this number into the Expertise column for each keyword.
Next I like to write out the Business Potential for each keyword. Iâll 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 arenât 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 doesnât sell t-shirts. They sell tumblers.
So we havenât written many articles about âsublimation on t-shirtsâ because we know that we donât have many products to promote for that topic. That doesnât mean we wonât 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:
Put this score into the Business Potential column in your table. Again, just because it doesnât match your customer persona doesnât mean itâs not worth writing about. But this will help you to prioritize the more value-heavy keywords first.
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 âhow to stain your deckâ 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 âbest dark deck stainâ means that theyâre ready to buy. Thatâs commercial intent.
I score Commercial Value on a scale from 1 to 3.
Mark down this score in the Commercial Value column of your table.
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.
Okay, thatâs 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 isnât there, you can delete the keyword from your list entirely.
Donât worry about filling out all of these columns if youâre not planning to go after that keyword anyway.
Next, Iâll show you how to use these scores to figure out your most high-priority keywords.
Going through that list, cross out any keywords where blog posts arenât ranking or it doesnât 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 â101 articlesââthe basic info that your customer wants to know to do business with you. Even if you donât 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 postsâ 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 canât vouch for the accuracy, but itâs 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. (Iâve 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 isnât 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 itâs worth covering that topic first, even if itâs not going to rank for a long time. Or if a certain keyword is very urgent for you, itâs 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 youâre just starting out) is going to be very hard to rank for at the beginning.
Finally, youâll 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 youâre 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: Itâs best to stick to one topic cluster at a time if youâre trying to get ranked faster. Google wants to see that youâre an authority in your subject. So if you build up a collection of content around that topic first, youâll have a better chance of being seen as an expert in that topic.
Once you have your content calendar in place, itâs 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.
There is no answer for this! (Fire any agency that promises you a time frameâyouâll thank me laterâŠ)
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 isnât crowded yet, and there isnât 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, youâll 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 companyâs 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 youâre really writing helpful stuff, people will naturally start sharing your content with others.
So there you have it! Letâs 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 thatâs a steal.
Iâm not affiliated, and sharing this link doesnât get me anything, but click here to check out the current pricing and plans for Ahrefs.
Now itâs 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).