Keywords help the search engine determine what your blog is about. If you’re planning to do more about your SEO strategy, stay tuned and learn more about the best keyword tools for blogging.
What is a keyword?
Every time you start searching for something on Google (or Bing, or Yahoo) you enter the term you are looking for and the search engine offers you the most relevant link first. A keyword is a specific word or a phrase that helps search engines determine what the website is about and to rank them for a particular keyword.
Keyword tools and types
If you type ‘bathroom’ in your search engine bar, the first few suggested queries are also keywords for your topic. You are probably going to get something like bathroom tiles, furniture, design, and ideas. These are the terms users were looking for. While Google suggested search can help you with getting a rough idea, there are more sophisticated keyword tools you should use for blogging.
There are few types of keywords you should know about, especially if you’re going to use paid advertising. But for an organic search, you need to pay attention mostly to long tail keywords and LSI keywords.
1 Long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are your best friend if you want to outrank your competitors organically. Long tail keywords are derived from your original keyword. Let’s take the ‘bathroom’ example from earlier.
The word “bathroom” is a keyword by itself.
Long tails are everything between ‘can bathroom tiles be reused’ to ‘bathroom near the central train station’. They are particular phrases that communicate the specific intent, and that’s why they can help you rank better among competitors. You will give your users the specific information they are looking at your blogging content for.
One of the visually nicest tools for long tail keywords is Answer the Public. This free tool gives you a helpful visual chart with questions, prepositions, comparisons, and alphabetical and related search results. This will provide you with an excellent idea of how you should think about keywords. You can download a CSV file and use it to plan the keywords for your next blog. Remember, long tail keywords represent the best how people actually look for things online.
2 Long tail keywords for a specific audience
To get better engagement and more reactions you don’t want to dissipate your effort on the broadly defined audience. When you are looking for long tail keywords with the famous Google Keyword Planner you can select a country, city, language, exclude negative keywords (words that you don’t want to appear in your search), and much more. Google’s Keyword Planner is free, and it’s indispensable source of ideas for long keywords.
You can see the search volume, competition for paid advertising, and search your product service in a specific category or groups of long tails.
3 LSI keywords
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing which refers to a technique of natural language processing. There is a whole bunch of science to it, and if you’re interested in the topic you can start exploring from this Wikipedia article.
In the context of digging keyword gold for blogging you need to think about LSI keywords as related search queries. They originated from other users’ behaviour, and they are usually associated with your main keyword.
You can find them at the bottom page of your Google search. You can also use LSI keyword tools like LSI Graph to find more contextually and semantically related words to branch out your original keyword into semantically related context.
When you enter ‘home decor’ into LSI Graph, you will see that it shows results like ‘discount wall decor’ and ‘home decorators outlet’. These results are indeed related to your keyword, but what can you do with them?
LSIs are synonyms, contextual word pairs, and you will probably include them in your blog piece without even trying. That’s their very nature, they have similar meaning to your main keyword; good writing often includes synonyms, so there is a very good chance many LSIs will find their way into your texts. However, you can always combine few keyword tools and incorporate them into your strategy too.
While there is no strict evidence that Google favours content with LSIs, there is reassurance in knowing that Google wants to promote helpful and informative blogging content with the intent to help the end users find the results they are looking for.
This statement is especially true for mobile marketing. When users turn to their mobiles and search for ‘how to tile a bathroom floor’ they need that information to finish their bathrooms. The query above has both LSI and a long tail.
Some business recorded DIY videos on YouTube in 2015 with these type of keywords. They had 43 million views, and they are still rocking with this strategy. This strategy was successful because it showed an intent to help the user and the understanding how to do it.
While we use keyword tools for SEO, we use our words, blogs, and overall content to help the user find what they are looking for.
We should remember that we are writing for people, not machines and that no matter how much we want to perfect our keyword strategy we should write honestly and naturally. Then, we can use these 3 keyword tools for blogging, to optimise the content and polish it to perfection without taking away its natural vibe and feel; ultimately, it will make it more visible and valuable for both search engines and readers.