Keywords for Your Blog – Using Google Search for Keyword Research

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Keywords for Your Blog – Using Google Search for Keyword Research

Using Google Search for Keyword Research

Using Google Search for Keyword Research

This is the fifth in a series of posts about researching keywords for your blog.   In the first post, Keywords for Your Blog- A Realistic Approach, I talked about how keywords are important for bloggers, but they are not the end-all that they are for niche marketers. Bloggers provide useful information to a niche group.  Niche marketers hammer a few pages with backlinks to rank on a very few keywords.  In the second post, I talked about Keywords for Your Blog – Create a Massive List of potential keywords.  The third post showed you how to use the FREE section in Market Samurai to take the massive list of  Keywords for Your Blog and Pare it Down    The fourth post looked at how you can analyze the competition for you keywords to see which ones your can actually use: Keywords for Your Blog – Competition Analysis.

The Topic Today is Using Google Search For Keyword Research.

Today we are going to take a different tack and ignore the Google Adwords Keyword tool.  (Almost all of the major keyword tools, just repackage the data from the Google Adwords Keyword tool.)    As I’ve noted in a couple of places, the Google Adwords Keyword tool focuses on competition for Ads in Google.  It does NOT look at competition among web pages.  You can actually do research using Google Search for Keyword Research.  Doesn’t it make sense to use the search engine itself to tell us what the Search Engine is doing?

You have a Keyword in Mind for a Blog Post – Now What?

Many times we have a post in mind and we have an idea for a keyword that who fit nicely.  My question to myself is usually “Is this keyword reasonable for SEO purposes or is there a longer tailed phrase that would be much better and fit just as well?”

Let me explain this question a little.  Here are some “facts” that you may or may not know.

  • Google ranks “Pages/Posts” not websites.  Overall website ranking does figure in, but the most important thins to Google is “How likely is it that THIS PAGE to provide the content that the user is looking for?”
  • Google has to pretty much guess what your are looking for based on your keywords.   Think about it.  “Blogging Information” could be a request for many different kinds of “information.”
  • Google uses very complicated criteria to try and determine if your blog page is going to provide good content to the user.
  • Some of the criteria are based on the page itself (Is the keyword in the title, in the URL, in headline, in the ALT field of an image, etc.)
  • Some of the criteria are based on what other people say about your content.  (Do they link to it?  Do they share it on Facebook?  When they read it do they leave in 2 seconds or do they stay and read?   Do they go to other pages on your site after they read the first page?)
  • When Google provides a page of links to a searcher,  virtually all of the clicks are on the first few links.  Searchers very rarely go to the second page and almost never to the third page.  They will start a new search before they go to page after page of results.

With all this in mind, let’s get real.   I could use the keyword “keywords” for this blog post.  There are millions of searches every day for “keywords.”  That’s great!.  However, there are some VERY established blogs (like Wikipedia) who dominate the top hundred listing or so.  That means that there is no possible way that anyone would ever see my post based on a Google search for “keyword”.   That is obviously a bad thing for me.

What to Do When Your Keyword Doesn’t Work?

If the keyword you are thinking about doesn’t seem likely to gain your any traffic, you look for a long tailed keyword phrase.  Instead of just using one or two very common words, we use a phrase that people are likely to use.  There will be fewer people searching with the phrase, but if we find the right one, we can rank on page one for the phrase.   Some traffic from a small group is better than NO traffic from a large group.

We are going to look at using Google Search for keyword research.  The engine itself will help us find useful keywords.

I’m going to reiterate something I’ve put int each of the previous posts, it’s just that important.

THE FOUR STEPS TO EFFECTIVELY USING KEYWORDS FOR YOUR BLOG.

  1. Develop a list of potential keywords for your blog.
  2. Use one (or more) of the phrases from your list.
  3. Do On-Page SEO
  4. Promote your post.

The Steps were covered in a little more detail in the first post.   We are still working on step 1 here.

Analyzing Keywords for FREE

IN the last post I mentioned this, but it is also relevant here.   There are several Free Firefox addons that you can use to look at your competition.   The two I like best are SEOQuake and SEO for Firefox.

For these tools you will need to copy and paste each keyword into the Google Search engine and look at the results.

Here you can see that SEOQuake adds a line to each result returned by Google.  You can see the Page Rank Column (PR) and the Links (to the individual page) and Links to the Domain.

SEOQuake - Listing for Video Blog

 

Let’s look at some searches in Google.   I’m going to use “Facebook Marketing” as my sample keyword.   I didn’t draw an arrow to it, but there are over a billion pages returned for this keyword.   There are three paid ads at the top and the Facebook.com itself is the top entry with over two trillion pages returned.   I don’t think I’m going to have much success here!

Facebook-Marketing-Google-Search

Using Google Search to Keyword Research – Add a Space

When I add a space to the end of my search phrase, Google makes some suggestions.    You can see that Google keeps track of what people tend to type after they type “Facebook Marketing.”   As near as I can tell this information is ignored by the Google Keyword Tool.   These different sections within Google give VERY different results.

Facebook-Marketing-Space-Google-Search

Okay – FOUR is nice, buy I’d like to see more!   Over on the right side of your page you will see a Gear Icon.  This is the standard symbol for settings.   When you click on the Gear Icon you will see a short menu.  Click on Search Settings.

Facebook-Marketing-Google-Search-SettingsYou will see a page that has this in the middle of it.   You may have noticed that Google now starts to give you results as soon as you start to type.  It didn’t used to do that.   These are called “Instant Results.”   We are going turn “Instant Results” off.   Then click on the SAVE button at the bottom of the screen (not shown.)

 

Facebook-Marketing-Google-Search-Settings-Instant-ResultsNow when we add the space to “Facebook Marketing” we get 10 results.

Facebook-Marketing-Google-Search-after-setting-change

If you see one that works for you click on it and see if maybe this longer phrase isn’t has competitive as the original phrase.   Of course you can add a space to your longer phrase and get an even long phrase.   Let’s try using Google Search for keyword research on the longer phrase “Facebook Marketing Solutions “.   You can see that we get more suggestions below.

Facebook-Marketing-Google-Search-after-setting-change-longer

As you can see we get even more options.

TEACHING POINT:  These phrases are things that people who are using Google actually type.   They are probably pretty good keywords.

Too Many Pages?

When you looks at 100,000 or 1,000,000 pages you might think that this is too many to compete against.   In a previous post on Filtering Your Keywords, I showed that Google reports MANY pages that it thinks are VERY similar when it generates the 100,000,000 numbers.   The post shows an easy way to determine how many unique pages you are competing against.

One more Google Search Tip

Let’s add an asterisk and a space to the beginning of our phrase.  This will give us “* Facebook Marketing”.    You see that you get some of the same phrases with words AFTER “Facebook Marketing”, but you also get some with words BEFORE the keywords we entered.

Facebook-Marketing-Google-Search-after-setting-change-front-load

Related Search Phrases

In addition to the suggestions that Google makes at the top of the page, there are also some “Related Phrases” at the bottom of the page.   You can use these too.

Facebook-Marketing-Related-Searches

 Find a Long Tail Keyword that works for your post idea and Use it

There you have it – a Step-by-Step System for Using Google Search for Keyword Research

Until next time, you have a Great Day!

Dr Hale

↓ ↓ If this post gave you some ideas – Go ahead & comment below.  ↓ ↓

Hale Pringle

Hale Pringle Ed. D.

 

Hale Pringle – Hale Yes!

Skype hale.pringle

Email: HaleYes@HalePringle.com

 

P.S. If you are working to move your business online and it all seems overwhelming, I can help!  Take a look at http://HalePringle.com, or sign up for the free coaching call. You can email me or give me a Skype call. I’ll give you the benefit of my years of experience and many thousands of dollars in training and searching the rabbit hole called Internet Marketing and Network Marketing. I can help you with Lead Generation, the feeling of overwhelm, blogging, and even career change. Add that to the finest mentoring on the Internet (Ann Sieg’s Team and Inner Circle) and you have a Winner!

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About Hale Pringle

Dr. Hale is an Internet Entrepreneur and Network
Marketing expert. His greatest pleasure is
helping people and he does just that, drawing
upon the immense resources that he has gathered
over the years in his unquenchable thirst for
knowledge.

Dr. Hale lives in beautiful, sunny Florida with
his wife, two dogs and a cat. His four children
are grown and are scattered around the state.

An eternal optimist you will hear him say
regularly: “Is this a Great Day?” The answer is
always, “Hale Yes!”

If you need help with your online marketing or a
network marketing opportunity Dr. Hale is the go
to man. “Hale Yes!”

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