How to find keywords and build a content strategy for your blog

In this post I’ll talk a little bit about the benefits you can expect from blogging regularly and also show you just one way to find new keywords to target in your blog posts. The post is aimed at relative new-comers to blogging who are looking for a bit of guidance and reassurance that blogging is a worthwhile exercise and will contribute greatly to your overall content marketing efforts over time.

When you first start blogging it’s easy to become demotivated. It’s not easy getting a new blog off the ground, there are a lot of different factors at play which determine whether or not people notice your posts and whether your new blog will appear in Google search results.

However, one thing is for certain: you’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t put pen to paper (so to speak) and actually write something. A new blog with no blog posts is nothing but a domain name. It won’t get found and even if it did it wouldn’t provide any value because there would be no content for people to read.

So it starts with your 1st post and here I’ll show you a great way to get out of the blocks and into a sprint.

I’ll use this post to demonstrate. It’s about what happens over time if you commit to writing regular blog posts. One of the main metrics I want to measure is how the post performs in Google search, so I need to select some keywords to track. I’m going to find these simply by Googling “benefits of blogging” and scrolling to the ‘related searches’ section at the bottom of the page, as shown in the screenshot below:

I’ll select some of these as my initial target keywords. A keyword like “benefits of blogging in the classroom” isn’t really relevant at this time so I won’t track it, but the SEO and Business related keywords are keepers!

Now it’s a waiting game. After publication, I need Google to index the page and over the next few weeks see if and where my post appears in the search results. In the meantime I’ll spend some time sharing the post with my followers on social media, an important factor which I’ll talk more about in another post.

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Now, you’re probably already a step ahead of me here, if we refer back to the list of related searches above you will notice these keywords are not only relevant to this post but would also make good posts in their own right. For example Benefits of blogging to business communication would make a great supporting post. As would Benefits of blogging for small business. Using this method we can very quickly put together a series of blog posts which are all very closely related and inter-connected.

By simply following the path laid out by Google in the related searches section we can gather lots and lots of different keywords which can be either target keywords for this blog post, or new blog posts which we can link together.

After a short while your blog will start to take shape. You’ll have published multiple blog posts relating to similar topics and themes and instead of having 1 blog post that may get found in Google for 1 or 2 keywords, you’ll have half a dozen posts which cumulatively get found for a dozen or more keywords. The key is to break down your strategy into target keywords and be concise will ever post, distinguishing between subtle differences in each post, for example, 1 post might be about SEO, another about Business, another about Marketing, but they all relate to the generic theme of blogging.

As you get further down the line and start to see some results by way of Google visibility, you can also start manipulating your posts for enhanced performance.

For example, let’s imagine, after a week or so this post gets found in Google for Benefits of Blogging but it’s way down on page 7. Or, it’s doing well for Benefits of Blogging, but not getting found for SEO Benefits of Blogging. What I might do is add some more relevant and keyword-rich content to the post to leverage its authority. I’ve seen rankings jump a few places, even a few pages up the rankings just by adding more relevancy to the original blog post.

If you have any questions about blogging and how it undoubtedly benefits your business, let me know in the comments, or email hello@alakazamblogposts.com