Keywords are littered in articles and in content just by creating it! But how does that relate to SEO and dang it, how do I know if they are the best keywords to send readers to my site?
Today we are going to look at choosing your keywords. This starts after you come up with your content topic and ends when you’ve got your article appearing in searches.
Today we came up with our content “What keywords do I want”? now we need some tools to help us answer that question. The tool needs to be, well, free because what’s better than free? I also want to be able to enter some keywords or phrases that I might use in my content and even better I’d like results that show how often that phrase or keyword is searched for. As luck would have it, Google has a tool for this (and it’s free).
As luck would have it, google has a tool for finding the popularity of keywords
I’ll walk you through step by step on how to use the tool to get the best keywords for my content and you can try it for yourself. Deal? Great! Let’s get started.
The tool is the google keyword planner (catchy name huh?) and it’s part of the Google Ads suite of tools. If you don’t already have a google AdWords account, we’ll create one with you in a moment and don’t worry … it’s free.
To join google AdWords you’ll need to sign up at ads.google.com. Once done we’ll be ready to start figuring out the best keywords for us. After logging in you should see the following menu bar.
Looking over at the right, there is a ‘crescent wrench’ or the second icon after the search/magnifying glass that has the words “tools & settings” under it.
Clicking on the tools icon will open a menu and over to the far right (first column) and second item from the top is the ‘Keyword Planner’ menu item. Choose that option.
We’re in like flint so now let’s get our hands dirty.
If this is your first time in the tool, there’s a little tutorial to show you how to enter new terms so can you just skip that and get down to business.
We’ve got two avenues so we are going to use the ‘discover new keywords’ feature. Click the little arrow in the ‘Discover new Keywords’ card and take a few moments to come up with and enter the keywords you want to start with. We want to try some keywords that we would normally put into our article, in my case: keyword, SEO, best keywords, keyword planner, … and so on. After typing each phrase or word, press enter or return to set that value so you can type some more words or phrases. When you are all done, click ‘Get Results’.
Great you’ve done it! Now let’s understand the results.
We have many columns but we want to look at what is important for us. Let’s review Avg. monthly searches. Google defines this as ‘Average monthly searches (“Avg. monthly searches”) shows the average number of searches for this keyword and its close variants based on the month range as well as the location and Search Network settings you selected. You can use this information to see how popular your keywords are during different times of the year.‘ In simple terms, this is how often people are looking for this keyword. We are going to start looking at this value first to get a start and ignore the other terms which are more for creating and optimizing advertising campaigns.
I’ve gone ahead and sorted my results by Avg. monthly searches (highest first) because it’s important to see what is desired the most. From a marketing perspective this is like going out and asking my customers, “What do you want?” My results show that there are a lot of people searching for ‘keyword planner’ (who wouldn’t be?) ‘google keyword planner’, ‘keywords everywhere’, and so on. The values for these first few items are 10k-100k search for these keywords. If my article focuses on these topics I’ll make sure to add them in, if not don’t include them because that will increase the bounce rate (don’t know what bounce rate is? After this jump to my article on bounce rate to help you understand a bit better). So pretty easy right? Great! Take some of those resulting keywords and pop them into the search bar to get other ideas on great key words.
There’s also another feature where the search results will provide a list of additional keywords. Clicking on one of those words will add it to your search and expand your results. It only allows one word at a time so if you wanted two or three — it might be better just to type them in. Still a useful feature.
There are other tools that can be used make sure you are getting the right traffic.
Next we’ll look at SEO word cloud generators and how to make sure your page says to search engines what you want.
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