How To Do SEO keyword research For Your Blog

Welcome to my mini-course (How To Do SEO Keyword Research For Your Blog) which explains what you need to know about using SEO keyword research to grow your blog/website.

In this section of the blog post, I explain what is SEO keyword research and why SEO keyword research is the foundation of any blog you create, and why it shapes and molds your entire content strategy.

What is SEO Keyword Research?

If you’re new to SEO, or even if you’ve been doing it for a while, you may have heard the term “keyword research” thrown around a lot.

But what is keyword research?

And why is it so important?

SEO Keyword research is the process of finding and choosing keywords that are relevant to your business or website.

These keywords are then used in your website content, in order to help improve your site’s ranking in search engines like Google.

Why is SEO keyword research so important?

Because it helps you understand what people are actually searching for when they use Google or other search engines. If you choose the right keywords, you can make sure that your website appears higher up in the search results pages (SERPs), which means more people will see it and visit it.

There are a few different ways to do keyword research – some people use specialized tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, while others just use good old-fashioned trial and error.

Whichever method you choose, make sure that you take the time to do proper keyword research – it could be the difference between success and failure for your SEO efforts.

Most people that start a blog think that the next logical step is to make it look pretty and then jump right into writing about topics that they think people want to read.

While I applaud the initiative to write as quickly as possible, you NEED to use data to determine what people are searching for and what topics aren’t too competitive in search engines.

Let’s get into the section and I’ll explain further.

While I’d love to tell you that each person who starts a blog will succeed, that isn’t true.

Heck, even I fail with new blog projects from time to time.

But do you know what differentiates successful bloggers from others?

They NEVER give up.

I was one of those people who never gave up.

I’ve said this countless times on my YouTube channel and in blog posts, but I’ve had so many dumb blog ideas that it’s kind of awesome, lol.

Here are a few I still laugh about (None of them are active, so don’t bother searching for them):

UnemploymentUnderground (dot) com — I made an unemployment site to help people find jobs….. while I was unemployed and couldn’t find a job.

My heart was in the right place in that I wanted to help people, but my brain wasn’t. How could I help others if I couldn’t help myself?

PicturesofBabiesintheWomb (dot) com — By far my dumbest idea. My plan was to steal pictures from Google and get people to my website to click on display ads.

Blatant copyright infringement and very dumb considering most people see images on Google, not on the website itself.

GoodNewsGum (dot) com — This site was focused on delivering only positive news to the masses.

Honestly, not a terrible idea.

But the strategy had a HUGE flaw in that it relied mostly on social media to succeed and was in the brutally difficult-to-monetize news niche.

After these failures and at least a dozen others, one day I felt like I had taken the red pill like Neo in the Matrix.

For those that have never seen the movie, The terms “red pill” and “blue pill” refer to a choice between the willingness to learn a life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in a world of ignorance with the blue pill.

I’d say that the “blue pill” is the standard blogging advice you get.

• Be everywhere on social media and post every single day!
• Publish blog posts 3 times a week and the traffic will come!
• Write the absolute best blog post on a topic and search engines will find you!
• Write about whatever you’re passionate about!

These are all crap. That’s right, I said it.

This stuff doesn’t really work, but time and time again I hear bloggers giving this advice and it’s simply not true.

Here’s why:

Be everywhere on social media and post every single day! — I never do anything on social media and get 500k traffic/month in my portfolio of sites with less than 0.5% coming from social media.

Social media can work in some niches, but it’s NOT a requirement.

If you’re new to this, it’ll just overwhelm you, don’t do it.

Publish blog posts 3 times a week and the traffic will come! — Sometimes a site only needs 1 post/week, other times it needs 10. It depends entirely on the niche, the time you can put into the project, and your budgetary constraints.

Quality is always more important than quantity.

Write the absolute best blog post on a topic and search engines will find you! — I’ve written some amazing content and months after publishing I check analytics and see that I was the only person to ever view the blog post.

While I wrote great content, search engines didn’t care because I had no authority/trust in my blog, so they never sent me any visitors.

Write content focused on whatever you’re passionate about! This advice really isn’t that bad, but the problem with it is that your passion needs to be worth writing about.

For instance, if you’re passionate about collecting stamps specifically from the year 1996 and you’re going to spend all your time writing about them, you’re going to waste a whole lot of time.

And there are plenty of other bad pieces of advice out there from people who aren’t in the trenches like you and me.

Or, even worse, they really aren’t that successful and are just trying to convince you to spend $100 on a crappy course they put together over a weekend.

The online business world is FILLED with people giving crappy advice that’ll hurt you more than it’ll help you.

Why am I different?

Well, if the 500k monthly visitors across my portfolio of websites didn’t impress you that I mentioned earlier, it’s probably a good time to mention I’ve made over $1 million blogging since I started in 2014.

No, I’m not trying to gloat, but I need you to know that I have a deep understanding of this blogging stuff.

I live and breathe it, I have every day since I started in 2014.

That all said, let’s answer the golden question….

Why do most bloggers fail?

The answer?

DRUMROLL…

The answer is….. STRATEGY.

Here are the steps that most new bloggers take.

1. Hear about how great blogging is and how they can make passive income and decide to start (Kudos to everyone who does this, by the way, most people are too scared to even try)
2. Read advice from various gurus about how many times they should blog each week and minimum word counts
3. Begin writing their butt off for consecutive weeks or months
4. Get 6 months in and see less than 100 total visitors to their blog
5. Decide it’s not working, stop, and give up their dream.

See how the above steps didn’t really have much of a strategy?

Without a strategy, how is your blog going to succeed? SPOILER: It won’t.

You need to think about things like this:

• How will your blog make money?
• How often will you write?
• Will you outsource any of the writing process?
• What is your monthly budget for your blog?
• What milestones will you hit in the first year?
• And most importantly…. HOW WILL YOU GET HIGH-QUALITY TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG?

The last one is the most important one.

Notice I said “high-quality” traffic.

I say this because if the content you’re writing is bringing a ton of website traffic that you can’t make money from, it’s nothing more than a vanity metric to make you feel good.

And vanity metrics doesn’t pay the bills, so you’ll eventually have to quit.

The absolute foundation of any blogging strategy is how the site will acquire high-quality traffic.

It’s the one thing that feeds all other components of the business and it’s not easy to figure this out for beginners.

I want to be the guy that helps you figure out the traffic problem and I want to do it by helping you understand how to get traffic from search engines like Google.

Why search engines?

It’s simple.

If you want a business that can grow to be an impressive stream of passive income every single month, search engines are the way to go.

Think about it…

Search engines like Google never close.

The internet is open 24/7–365 days a year.

If you can find a way to get ranked on the first page of search engines, you’ll get visitors to your site, and you’ll essentially have “free” traffic visiting you month after month, year after year.

There is no need to buy ads or pay for anything at all.

This is what I have based my entire business model on and frankly, it works.

So, how can you get this traffic?

And more importantly, what kind of timeline can you expect to get HIGH-QUALITY traffic to your site if you take all of the right steps?

That’s a good question…..

And that’s exactly what my next chapter is going to cover.

ACTION STEPS OF THIS CHAPTER:

Before you get to the next chapter, I want you to understand that you absolutely MUST use data to grow your blog. Forget about your intuition or passion, keyword research allows you to better understand how to harness DATA to create content that can rank on search engines and drive traffic to your website for years to come.

A Realistic Blog Traffic Timeline For Your First Year

In this chapter, the focus will be on explaining two VERY important things you need to understand about getting traffic from search engines and the expected timeline to see results.

Why is this important?

There are so many people who start a blog, work hard for a few months, and then give up.

This chapter is focused on realistic expectations and things you MUST know before you focus on writing content.

My blogs thrive because search engines, mainly Google, continually send me website traffic free of charge.

Frankly, I don’t want you to be one of those people that quit and I think this chapter will help you understand the mindset you need before you begin.

Let’s get into the chapter.

First off, the information you read here is absolutely golden.

Forget what you’ve read elsewhere, this is going to be more HONEST and HELPFUL than most of the other content you’ll read on the subject of keyword research.

Everything I’m about to tell you is based on experience and not just experience from one website.

As of now, I have 3 websites that average over 150,000 visitors each month that I’ve built from scratch and other sites that are growing very quickly.

Most people have one website and share a “hack” they found.

Others get to 100,000 visitors a month and think they’ve cracked the code.

The difference here is that I’ve built a whole portfolio of sites and seen many more data points than most people ever will.

Do I have Google completely figured out to give me unlimited traffic?

Absolutely not, and anyone who tells you this is a liar.

But what I do have is a very specific set of steps I follow to grow a website from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors.

And today, I want to give you a glimpse into the first year of that strategy.

Before I begin, there are two important things to understand about getting traffic from search engines.

1) Getting traffic from Google and other search engines isn’t complicated.

People like to overcomplicate it, but it’s really not warranted.

They focus on things like;

• How fast is your website?
• How long are your articles?
• How many articles have you written?
• How many times do you post on social media each week?
• Etc.

If you want traffic from search engines, two things matter more than anything else.

High-quality content and links to your website.

While there are other factors that matter, I’d say that these two factors are around 85% of the reason that search engines rank websites where they do in search results.

2) To create good content, and launch a website in the right niche, you need to fully understand keyword research.

If you don’t know what keyword research is, Keyword research is the process of researching search terms that people type into search engines, and strategically creating content so that your website appears as the first result.

An example would be if you write an article explaining “NICHE BLOG INCOME GENERATOR”

If you copy/paste that into Google, you’ll see that my niche blogging course ranks in position #1 or #2. That’s very much by design.

In fact, with every website I build, keyword research is the one thing I refuse to outsource.

I consider this to be the foundation of any website you build and if you don’t do this correctly, you’re destined to fail.

Not only does this help you understand if you’re choosing the right niche, but it also helps you determine hundreds or thousands of blog post topics before you get started. This not only validates the idea of your blogging business, but it eliminates blogger burnout due to having to always think of new topics.

Now that we’ve covered these two points, let’s discuss expectations about getting traffic to your blog.

I’ll do this by explaining what the first year of a site looks like and actions to take along the way.

Months 0–4: Use keyword research to find opportunities that are low competition (usually under 5 in Ahrefs or over 5 in Keyword Chef) and low search volume (150 monthly searches and under).

Focus on writing or outsourcing quality content as much as you can. 3 posts per week would be great if possible. Don’t expect any love from search engines yet, they don’t know or care about what you’re doing. Don’t get discouraged, this is NORMAL.

Months 5–6: Continue with the level of content production that you’ve had previously.

Consistency is the key to growing your site. If you stop or give up now, you’ll be on the cusp of something good and not even know it. Wanting to quit here is normal, DON’T.

On a positive note, it’s very likely that you’re starting to see some traffic trickle into your website from Bing and other smaller search engines. It won’t be much, but 50–100 visits each month is right on track.

Month 7: This is a month focused on link building. And I’m not talking about dodgy/crappy links either, I’m focused here on links from high-quality outlets with a good reputation in Moz or Ahrefs.

How many links do you need? 7–10 is just fine.

More would be better, but don’t overwhelm yourself or try to buy a bunch of links from people selling.

Use guest posting to build links or try resource page link building. If you can keep up with your content calendar, great!

If not, it’s okay to take a break from the content and focus on the links 100% for this month.

Forget about “Web 2.0” links and all of the other jargon you’ve heard/read, just keep it to guest posts and/or resource page link-building.

Months 8–11: Now is the time to go back to creating content at the same pace you were before.

While traffic isn’t significant yet, you’re going to start to notice that Google is sending you some traffic.

This is JUST THE BEGINNING of something much bigger.

Stay the course, your first year is always slow but if you stick to it, you’re going to build something that may pay your mortgage every month within the next year.

Month 12: By now you’re seeing some posts on your website get traffic and that’s super encouraging!

Now is a good time to look at the content that is already getting traffic and see if you can revise it to get even more traffic.

For this, you’ll need a tool like SurferSEO to make these revisions and now that your site has some recognition in search engines, you’re much more likely to succeed and get additional traffic to the content you’ve already written.

Month 13 and on: I’ll discuss this with you in another chapter.

There are some tactics you use at this point that goes beyond the scope of this chapter and I want to make sure my advice is clear.

ACTION STEPS OF THIS CHAPTER:

Realize that simplicity is crucial to getting traffic from search engines.

If you go on the internet and do a bunch of research about how to grow a blog, you’re usually going to find someone who had one successful site or gives generalized advice.

That’s not me.

Everything I’m telling you is based on my portfolio of sites with multiple data points.

Don’t forget that.

Scaling Your Blog to Success

In this chapter, I’m going to explain to you what it takes to succeed after your first year with a blog and how you can grow and scale your business on autopilot.

Why is this important?

The first year for every blogger is a struggle.

You spend countless hours writing or editing content and many sleepless nights trying to understand exactly how to build a blogging business.

But, after the first year, patterns start to emerge and you’ll grow tired of working so many hours.

This chapter will help you understand what steps you can take to reduce your workload and propel the growth of your business faster than ever before.

Let’s get into the chapter.

Once you hit month 13 and on, this is where scaling is necessary.

At this point, you’re going to start to see momentum and/or profitability from your blog.

This is a very exciting time for a blogger.

While you probably aren’t making more than a couple of hundred dollars a month, reinvesting that money and continuing to invest in your blog to compound your earnings in the future is crucial.

• You can replace yourself as the writer or hire another writer to help you and begin investing more heavier in the content.
• You can hire a virtual assistant and train them to post content on the site for you.
• You can become or hire an editor to review your content and confirm that it’s of high quality.

The concept of the site has been proven with the traffic you’re getting, now you need to scale effectively to grow even further.

But here’s the thing.

If you’re reading this, scaling doesn’t matter yet.

What matters more than anything else is that you use keyword research to guide your strategy.

Because without a proper strategy, you’ll never be able to scale effectively.

If you don’t get this right, your website will likely fail as you’ll invest in the wrong type of content.

But…..

• How do you properly do keyword research?
• What’s the secret to finding keywords you can rank for in the first year and beyond?
• Which keywords are the most profitable?

I’d love to answer these questions right now, but I think it’s better suited for the next chapter.

I’ll let you know what actions you can take to make sure that you complete keyword research successfully.

If you think you’re doing keyword research successfully right now, great.

But I guarantee that my approach is different than most and I think that’s proven by the fact that I’ve been able to create so many successful websites, so I’ll bet I can teach you something.

ACTION STEPS OF THIS CHAPTER:

Understand that the best way to grow your blog is to outsource tasks.

Whether that be writing, editing, posting, or anything that can save you some time, it’s worth hiring someone to help. The reason? You should make it your goal to focus on strategy, specifically your content strategy, to grow your blog in both traffic and profitability.

After all, you’re the CEO of the business and I don’t know many successful CEOs that work on the assembly line.

Even though you CAN write a blog post and rank for a specific keyword, doesn’t always mean you should.

The key to any keyword research that you do is to understand the search intent behind the keyword and your strategy to monetize the keyword.

WHAT IS SEARCH INTENT?

The idea behind search intent is to try to understand the objective that the individual searching is trying to achieve when they search for something.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Before I start a new blog, I dive into what I call a “keyword dump”.

What’s that?

It’s kind of like…this.

But instead of staring at a pile of crap, I’m staring at the keyword data for a business idea that could generate thousands of dollars every single month.

I take time to build out a spreadsheet that has thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords.

I then organize and assess those keywords to make sure that:

• The site I’m about to build has enough search volume to make sense as a business
• Understand how the keywords will fit into my content strategy
• Decide the monetization strategy for each potential blog post
• Make sure that I avoid keyword cannibalization (In other words, make sure I don’t write about the same topics that interfere with other rankings I already have)

Plus, this keyword dump inevitably ALWAYS leads to….you guessed it, more keyword ideas.

This keyword dump and the research that I do at the beginning is the same spreadsheet I use for MONTHS or even YEARS afterward.

Sure, I tweak it here and there and add new things as I go, but I’m a big believer in leading with data.

In other words, I don’t care what I think about a particular niche.

I don’t care what you think about a particular niche.

I don’t care what anyone thinks, I care about what the data is telling me.

This approach is what has led me to results like this:

And this…

And this……

And even this….

Which, more importantly, has led to this…

But unfortunately, keyword research is ignored far too often.

If you walk away from this chapter, walk away with this one piece of information…

KEYWORD RESEARCH IS THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR BLOG.

And I want to help you build that foundation properly.

ACTION STEPS OF THIS CHAPTER:

Take some time to think about the blog you’re creating and how keyword research will play a part in your strategy.

As I already mentioned, keyword research is an absolutely crucial part of your success and you NEED to lead with data in order to succeed.

Here’s the SURPRISE I Promised you

In this chapter, we’re going to discuss just how deep the keyword research hole goes. In addition, since it’s the end of the course, we’ll talk about where to go from here.

We’re reaching the end of the SEO KEYWORD RESEARCH Mini-course.

And so far, you’ve learned quite a few things.

I’ve taught you;

• Why most bloggers fail (Lack of Strategy)
• A realistic traffic timeline for your first year
• How you can scale your blog to success
• A VERY IMPORTANT mistake to avoid (Proper keyword research and intent)

And while all of this should be helpful in giving you a basic understanding, there’s so much more to cover about SEO keyword research.

• Important things to know about keyword research tools
• What’s the best keyword research strategy
• Keyword strategy approach for a new website
• Checking on false positives
• Why a keyword data dump is essential and how to build it
• Tutorials showing you actual keyword research strategies in practice
• My EXACT personal process when I do keyword research for a new site

All of these things would be great to give you via this min course, but they’re so in-depth that it’s very difficult to put in here.

So I have some good news and bad news.

Let’s start with the good news first.

Good News

I have an entire course that’s dedicated to helping you better understand SEO keyword research and how to use it effectively to boost traffic to your blog.

Bad News

Currently, the course isn’t open for enrollment.

I like to launch the course periodically to control how many students enter and make sure that I can make revisions after every launch to make the course better.

So, how can you get the course?

Stay subscribed to my email list and keep an eye out for when I launch the course.

I do this 3–4 times per year and I’ll send a few messages to my main email list (which you need to now subscribe to) when I do.

Until then, please enjoy the insights/advice I’ll give you every week to help you grow your own successful online business.

Need some help? Let me do your SEO keyword research for you

Why should you care about keywords? Because they are the key to directing new and recurring visitors to your website.

We perform comprehensive research and make content recommendations that match the language of your audience and your website.

Here’s what you get:

• A complete overview of the keywords you’re already ranking for with recommendations to improve rankings.
• A review of the keywords your competitors are ranking for: your strengths, your weaknesses, and potential untapped opportunities.
• A freshly gathered list of keywords we discovered by thinking about your target audience’s needs and your goals.
• A video review of the entire research with recommendations on improving your current pages, creating new ones, and potential topics for your blog.
• Ranking Keywords + Competitor Keywords + Keyword Pool + 50 Selected Keywords

delivery time: 14 Days Delivery

Price: $500

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