Should I Use Keyword Research for my Blog?

should I use keyword research for a blog
 
Keyword research is normally needed for every page of your website. In a perfect world also for every blogpost a keyword research should be done. Ofcourse, in the real world most blog post just need a general idea and a 5 minutes reseach. Blog post will be found by a different group of people than the people who are looking for your company webpage.

Simplified keyword research means: test your long tailed keyword in the search engine. This picture is a screenshot from a search query which doesn’t work. Google doesn’t understand the query and offers different ones at the bottom of the page..

All marketeers, bloggers, people who write about SEO including myself preach that keyword research before you start an article is of high importance. Without research, you are shooting in the dark and high notation for a valued search query is almost impossible.

The brutal truth is that you need first authority in the web before you can rank high. Most of the times you will find companies with a large blog dominating the first page. These companies have created the authority at a subject and will rank high with every post on that subject. The related products which are sold on the website gives even more authority.

Assumptions

I assume that the Google spider is still searching for new pieces of webpages. Google algorithm is indexing the keywords and the so-called long tailed key words. Outputting them from 1 to one million as soon as a search query is received. This output is our concern.

I also assume that people type in certain keywords when they search for information. So, in common sense you should follow long tailed key words which are typed by the searcher, so that they can find your article.

At the moment, where the web is full of articles, explaining the same thing by different websites, the keyword research becomes less effective. Basically all keywords are already so often described, that your article can only land at number two-hundred-thousand of the one million search results.

Long tailed Key Word Sentence Search Test

So, what about this long-tailed key word. Is it true, if you start searching a long tailed sentence that you will end up with this sentence in your results? To test this, I searched for

7 good reasons to do keyword research

In the leading picture you can see that Google didn’t found anything close to my search. There was one article with 3 good reasons for long tailed keywords, the rest of the page is about the how to do keyword research variant. So in the end of the page Google shows me what is indexed and what should be used to look for an article.

Google assumes that these are the articles which I am looking for. Google is looking particular at the ‘to do’ in my search sentence. As soon as I changed this ‘to do’ into something like the word ‘for’, better results were coming from Google.

7 good reasons for keyword research

More competition, more results? Or is it just my wording, which didn’t match the English grammar?

Search engines preferences

Keywords typing is measured by probably the search engines and they are still not that smart. The “to do” is nowadays such a strong phrase that this triggers the search engine as the most important part of the sentence. Google didn’t follow our SEO logic of long tailed keywords. The search index of Google is just programmed that the ‘to do’ phrase overwrites the ‘7 good reasons’ phrase, at least when I am logged in.

So most searchers are typing the ‘to do’ variant and the programmers of Google are preferring this. In that sense, the search for a good long tailed key word might be a good idea. Not via all kind of programs, but just by typing it in the Google search. The biggest problem is of course that you should not be logged in with Google as this interferes with your search results.

Local phrases

If your shop or business is local then a headline with the town named in the title is just a logic solution. A search in Google will teach us that the long tailed phrase is not that important. Google search results starts with all the company’s which are listed in Google map. So in this case, you will do your website a favor if you just register your company with Google.

After this Google starts with the titles which have the city named. Not much research and long tailed keywords to do for local SEO. Of course there are exceptions for large cities, with have a lot of the same business.

Normal sense

According the articles I receive in my mailbox, Google is getting better in delivering good content in the search results and the social sharing has a big impact on this. Further more is the title of the content important as this should attract the first readers. With all these signals, I assume that just make a title, which might be searched for is the best way to go. Typing the title into a search engine will show you if Google understands the title and what kind of articles it will deliver back to you.

So some kind of research is done, but not the way which is promoted by the companies who are selling software to us for keyword research. Even Google came two years ago to the conclusion that the tool for keyword search is not that important for good content ( the tool is now under Google Adwords ).

My conclusion of writing good content is not to use two hours for keyword research. The web is now full of good content with great titles. It doesn’t bring much, just doing two hour research and find out that your title is so clever that the Google index doesn’t have a spot for it.

Typing your search query into Google and Google will start suggesting. These are the most used queries. These you should probably follow. As soon as reach the level of authority by engaging readers, like with email lists or sharing signals the posts will end higher in the ranking.