1. Start With Audience Research

While starting with Keyword research can quantify a good keyword, audience research qualifies it.

In order to market to your target audience, you need to understand their wants, needs and desires. Here are some questions to get that process started:

• What age group is your audience?
• What is their income bracket?
• What do they like to do in their free time?
• Where are they in their career and where do they want to be?
• What do they love?
• What do they hate?

Audience research starts with customer journey mapping or putting yourself in the shoes of your customers to see your business the way they do.

Although a keyword can quantitatively feel like a good fit, the target audience might not line up with your keyword — meaning that you likely wouldn’t see a great ROI.

Let’s put it into practice: Say you’re a startup company that helps young adults build their credit.

You’re looking to establish authority in the finance space and find the keyword “mutual fund vs. ETF.” Although it may seem like a good match, the audience doesn’t match up to your brand.

People searching for mutual funds and ETFs are likely further into their career, have more disposable income and are looking into investment options.

Instead, start by mapping your customer journey. Put yourself in the shoes of a fresh-out-of-college 20-something, just starting figuring out their financial situation. What do people around this age like to do? What are their habits?

We picture a tech-savvy worker who, in typical Zillennial fashion, avoids talking on the phone or going in-store at all costs.

Then, we step back to look at keywords surrounding online payments and credit scores. We find the term “online payment methods.”

Next, we bring this back to our brand offering of helping young people build their credit, and ultimately uncover the keyword “Does PayPal credit affect credit score?”

This checks all the audience research boxes:

• Closely aligns with audience intent
• Makes sense from a brand perspective

It’s worth noting that keyword research isn’t always this neat. No matter your industry, start by putting your audience at the forefront to find terms that convert.

2. Find Your Keyword

Although SEO-friendly content prioritizes the user, picking the right keyword is essential to build a winning blog post.

Here are some of our favorite tools for keyword research:

• Ahrefs: This is a one-stop shop for all types of keyword research. However, Ahrefs does require a paid subscription.
• Google Keyword Planner: Google’s free alternative to Ahrefs.
• Pinterest: This is best for lifestyle markets like beauty, home and e-commerce sites.
• Reddit: Beyond industry-specific subreddits, we recommend checking out r/dataisbeautiful, r/infographics and r/coolguides.
• Google Trends: Great tool for finding relevant topics that peak during certain months of the year.

Although keyword research tools are extremely valuable for finding high-impact keywords, it’s important to treat them as indicators of general trajectory rather than the end-all-be-all of your metrics.

These tools estimate the search volume (how many searches per month) and keyword difficulty (how hard that term is to rank for, out of 100) to give you a general idea of how feasible a keyword is.

A great way to find keywords is to start with your core offering and work backward. It’s important to understand where your customers’ journey and product intersect.

Are you an enterprise SaaS company that helps with data integration? Or an e-commerce site that sells perishable goods?

Let’s dive into that e-commerce example.

Say one of your product offerings is flowers. A search in a keyword research tool will show us that this has a search volume of 1.2 million users per month and keyword difficulty of 93 out of 100.

In SEO writing, these higher numbers aren’t always better. Although there’s a high search volume, a startup brand would have a hard time ranking for a term with a keyword difficulty of 93.

Although there are no hard-and-fast rules about what numbers to go after, you can base your general strategy on your domain rating (i.e., how authoritative your website is on a scale of 0 to 100).

Keep in mind that these numbers are largely industry-dependent, and business-leaning industries will likely be more competitive.

40 or less Domain Rating (DR): Startups or small businesses

• Go after low keyword difficulties of 30–35 or less
• Consider manual link building to accelerate ranking
• Supplement with passive link-driven content like “what is X” or “ X statistics”

40–50 DR: Mid-size businesses

• Go after keyword difficulties of up to 40–50
• Consider manual link building to accelerate ranking
• Supplement with passive link-driven content like “what is X” or “ X statistics”

50+ DR: Enterprise businesses

• Go after medium keyword difficulties of up to 50+, keeping topical relevance in mind. The higher your DR, the less of a cap on keyword difficulty.
• Rely primarily on passive link-driven content for your link building strategy

Luckily, there are some SEO tricks to uncover easier keywords with lower search volume. These tips will help you find keywords that are much easier to rank for:

• Check the People Also Ask (PAA) box. This is a search engine results page (SERP) feature that shows questions related to your query. From this, we can see the term “what is the most popular flower,” which has a much more manageable KD of 23.

• Use Google autocomplete. Type your target keyword into the Google search bar and see what suggestions come up. These are typically long-tail terms that other people have searched.

• Check related searches. These typically appear at the bottom of the SERP and, similar to autocomplete, show related topics people have searched.

• Look at the competition in a keyword research tool. What pages of theirs are bringing in the most traffic or conversions? Can you create something better?
• Use Answer the Public. Type your parent keyword into Answer the Public to find tons of related questions. Then, cross-reference with the keyword difficulties above to see which are feasible for your current DR.

Choosing your keyword is far more qualitative than it seems. It’s relatively simple to look at a few keywords and find the one with the highest search volume and lowest keyword difficulty.

But what initially seems like a great fit may not be as perfect as you initially thought. That’s why audience research is so important.

3. Evaluate Search Intent

Although some keywords may look like a good fit, the SERP might be pulling up products, local recommendations or other features that indicate your blog post might not be the right fit.

Search Intent is the purpose of a user’s search. Are they trying to buy a product? Land on a specific website? Find a local sandwich shop?

In order to rank for your keyword, you need to make sure your post matches the search intent.

While a keyword like “how to build a desk” has a clear ordered list structure, the SERP for “how to make a sandwich” is more of a mixed bag.

In general, there are four types of search intent: informational, commercial, transactional and navigational.

Informational Intent

Informational intent helps users learn more about a topic. It looks at related keywords, commonly asked questions and similar topics to pull the most helpful information first. Informational intent is typically more top funnel.

Take the query “what is a shacket.” Informational intent queries answer this question and provide context on terms that users might be searching surrounding this topic, like “how to wear a shacket” or “shacket styling tips.”

Examples:

• What is a shacket
• How to wear a shacket

Commercial Intent

Commercial queries often compare or rank products, providing specific information to help users get closer to making the purchase. Commercial intent is typically more mid to bottom funnel.

Examples:

• Shacket vs. jacket
• Best shackets 2022

Transactional Intent

Transactional intent is meant to help the user make a purchase. These are often more bottom funnel queries. Transactional queries aren’t as common when writing content for blogs or resource hubs.

Examples:

• Shackets near me
• Where to buy a shacket

Navigational Intent

Navigational intent helps users get to a specific destination.

Navigational intent is often branded (e.g., Nordstrom shackets), which is part of why building your brand name and recognition is crucial in SEO. These tend to be bottom funnel queries with high intent to purchase.

Examples:

• Nordstrom shackets
• Burlington Coat Factory shackets

Once you’ve determined that your keyword is a good fit for your search intent, you can start building your SEO foundation. Check out our free blog post templates for some inspiration.

4. Write Your Title

The title is your chance to make a good first impression.

Post titles might seem intuitive. But some small differences make a big impact on CTR, bounce rate and overall user satisfaction.

Here are some guidelines to write a best-in-class article title:

• Use modifiers. Is your post cheaper, faster or newer than the competition? Can we add adjectives like free, fast, quick or best to our post?
• Put the keyword as close to the front as possible. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but ideally, you want to get it as close as makes sense.
• Add brackets. Hubspot found that brackets in headlines can increase clicks by up to 40 percent.
• Evoke an emotion. Backlinko found that titles with positive or negative sentiment improved CTR by up to 7 percent.

Ideally, your title should take industry and vertical nuances into account. Here are some examples:

Once you’ve crafted your click-worthy title, you can move on to building your SEO architecture.

5. Choose Your Title Tag

A title tag is the title you see appear in search results. These differ from article titles, which is what you see when you land on a page.

A high-impact title tag should make an entrance, draw attention and keep users engaged.

Compared to titles, title tags often include the brand name. This is a key way to differentiate yourself on the SERP and use your brand authority to drive visits.

Title tags are a significant ranking factor for Google. They’re made of crawlable HTML code that helps Google determine the big-picture topic of your article — hence the importance of including your primary keyword.

In a perfect world, the title tag formula is simple:

Primary Keyword, Hook – Brand Name

But SEO writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Here are some real-world ways to optimize your title tag for SEO:

• Keep the length under 60 characters. We recommend using a title tag checker.
• Be a 95 percent match for your title. Make a few small changes if needed, but you want to send a clear, aligned message to Google.