If you are an affiliate marketer or a regular blogger, you are more than likely very familiar with the term keyword research. You should already be in the habit of doing research for keywords to target before you get started on writing your blog post.
Keyword research is integral to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns, which is the rankings in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Whenever you start looking for information on keywords, you will get inundated with posts relating to keyword research. Now keyword research is important; but unless you know the fundamental basics of what a keyword is, there is no point in going into detail on keyword research.
In this post, I want to share with you some key information around keywords or keyword phrases. What they are, the importance of keywords and how to use them in your content.
We will then cover off some basics around keyword research…
When you first start looking into creating a blog, website or an online business we often think we don’t know what a keyword is. But you will be surprised to know that you are always using a keyword or phrase when you type anything into a search engine like Google.
It is the search term you are using to look for information or help with understanding a topic.
Another thing to know is that a keyword is not necessarily classed as a single word. If I typed into Google “what is a keyword or phrase?” into google that is a keyword. It looks like a phrase, but the important thing to know is that Google uses this term to show you the best results.
The more specific you are in your search, the more relevant your search results will be.
If you just typed, “Keywords”.
Google would do its best to show you results that are relevant to keywords. But it is doing a best guess, as they do not understand what you are trying to get out of that term. That is quite a broad term, whereas any of the below would give them a good idea on what you are trying to understand:
Let’s get into the importance of keywords and how relevance is the main factor.
When people first start out with an online business and start doing keyword research, they often fall into the trap of 
focusing on getting their content ranked higher up the search engines.
I’ll admit, it is important to get your blog at the top of the search engines.
But you need to remember a key thing. The people who find your blog, if the content is not relevant or helpful, they will leave your website.
That will harm your rankings more, as Google will see that people are not interacting with your blog.
Google compares your content against the keyword you are trying to rank for.
It is important to know that Google will actually look through all of your content, so whilst your target keyword might be “What is a Keyword or Phrase?” You might actually rank against other terms within your content too.
Now, if I had used that keyword in my title (as I have here), but all I did was try and sell you a keyword research tool when you are still trying to understand a keyword. That is not relevant and will make you steer away from my blog.
One of the best bits of advice I can give you around using keywords on your blog or website is to make sure it is helping someone. Helping people is more effective than trying to sell to people.
Keywords are so important, as they help the search engines understand what your content is about, that allows them to rank it against the other competing posts for that same keyword. If yours answers the question better and is from an authority website it will rank higher.
But it needs to also answer the relevant questions regarding that keyword for the people who are searching and ultimately choosing your blog to help them.
An old technique that is still shown as a method in some places talks about “keyword stuffing”. This is where you practically put the keyword anywhere and everywhere in your post and it would rank.
But naturally, this did not paint a good picture when the user came onto that page. They quickly came off the page as it was poorly written.
Google has done a lot of work on its crawling algorithms and now they actually read your content and keyword stuffing is no longer accepted practise.
My advice would be to include your target keyword in the following places:
Don’t worry if you include the keyword naturally throughout the post, as long as your content is relevant and helps explain the topic to someone who clicks on your post. That is the part that really matters.
But by putting them in the places above, you are telling Google what your content is about. If it is high-quality and helps someone who clicks on it and they find it useful, Google will notice this and possibly rank you better too.
Every piece of content on your blog or website will start with keyword research. Targeting a specific keyword and writing a helpful informative post for that keyword.
But another key factor in where Google ranks that content is user engagement. As your website grows and your authority grows, and you get more traffic. How that traffic engages with your content will also affect the rankings of your posts.
Your rankings could go up (if they really love your content and read it and interact with it) or they could go down (if they find the content is lacking in some areas).
Now you have a common grasp of what is a keyword or phrase, the natural next step is keyword research. I will touch on the basics here, but if you want a more definitive answer, please check out my What is Keyword Research in SEO post.
Without doing any keyword research, to be honest, your chosen keyword is useless. The reason is, you are walking blindly
with that strategy.
You need to know how many searches that keyword gets, how much traffic you can expect if you rank at the top of the search engines and how many other posts are competing for that keyword too.
Keyword research is a fundamental step in any online business owners route to creating strategy.
You might write a 4,000-word article that answers every single question in a specific topic and find that you get no traffic because it is up against an authority website, that gives you no chance as you stayed too broad in your keyword.
One of the best strategies for a new or fairly new website is to target low-hanging-fruit keywords.
We have already covered off what a keyword or keyword phrase could be, but a low-hanging-fruit keyword is referring to a keyword that when you do keyword research, it has a small amount of traffic each month but more importantly, it has low competition.
Below is a screenshot, where I have searched for the term “What is a Keyword” in a keyword research tool:
That chosen keyword has tons of traffic, but there is a high number of competing websites for that same term.
What is a Keyword – It has an average of 35,516 search terms a month but 212 competing posts for that same term.
Now, if you were an established authority website you could probably compete and get high enough with that term.
But when starting out, that would be really hard to compete with.
Now, if you were to look at the keyword “What is a keyword phrase” – That does only have an average of 96 searches a month, but only 24 competing posts.
The Low-Hanging-Fruit technique is the way forward for a new website to build up traffic and authority. By consistently targeting these keywords, you can have the trickle effect.
Loads of posts, where they all receive some traffic. But the overall effect is your traffic levels are rising overall.
Once you have built up your authority in your niche, you can then start competing for more keywords.
Imagine 100 posts, all competing for low-hanging-fruit keywords and are competing well will get you a lot more traffic than 1000 posts targeting high competition keywords and getting nowhere.
Related Post: What is Keyword Research in SEO
If you still have any questions around keywords, keyword research or anything at all please write them in the comments below and I will definitely come back to you with an answer as soon as I can.
Thanks for reading, John
Welcome to our Jaaxy Review!
One of the most fundamental basics of any online business will be keyword research. Without keyword research you will be walking blind and hoping for the best.
Whether you are targeting SEO or PPC Marketing you need a keyword research tool you can rely on to help you get started and still be relevant when you become an experience Internet Marketer.
Today, we are going to explore Jaaxy. Brought to us from the guys behind Wealthy Affiliate, we are going to see just how it stacks up.
Keyword research and SEO are one of the first things you need to grasp when starting out in the online world, getting your website found by the search engines and getting it to page one are key steps in any new online business.
This post will go into what is keyword research in SEO and how to master it like a pro in a simple way for anyone to understand.
Let’s start with what is SEO and what it has to do with Keyword Research.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is around ensuring your website, your content and anything else on your website is optimised ready for search engines to find it. This is typically achieved through a plugin like ‘All-in-one SEO’ or Yoast. A plug-in like this will tell the search engines about your website so it can get ranked.
But when it comes to your content, then that is where keyword research is important. But what is a keyword?
The first thing to get your head around is it can be more than one word – any word or phrase that you type into a search engine – Google, Bing, YouTube is a keyword. When you type in that keyword, the search engines respond with a list of the most relevant content for that given keyword.
When you submit content to a search engine, it is checked for relevance to the keyword, the quality of the content and one of the major recent changes is that it is checked against being mobile friendly. It also changes against traffic, the more traffic a post gets the higher it will be up in the rankings.
The main reason why you need to do keyword research is down to the fact that a common keyword will already be swamped with authority sites that mean you will find it very hard to rank high against these sites to begin with.
Keyword Research with the right tool, will make your job so much easier. Rather than typing up a great article against a highly competitive keyword and getting no results. You could put that same article against a lucrative low-hanging-fruit keyword and it gets you on page one of the search results. This means people are more likely to click on your link.
Keyword research is all about understanding the number of searches there are for a given keyword and also how much competition you will have against that given keyword.
To show you an example, I have typed “what is keyword research” into my chosen keyword research tool, Jaaxy.
You can see that there are a number of columns, lets first go into what they all mean.
Avg – This is the average number of searches for that keyword in a given month on Google.
Traffic – How many clicks you can expect if you are ranking at the top of page one
QSR – these stands for Quality Score Results, the number of websites you will be up against (Your Competition)
KQI – Keyword Quality Indicator, Green is great, yellow ok and avoid the red ones.
SEO – A score based on traffic and competition, the higher the number the more likely you are to rank higher.
Domains – this will let you know if that keyword is available as a domain name.
Let’s go back to the results for that keyword, if I had chosen the top one ‘what is keyword research’ it has an amazing number of monthly searches and traffic, but I would be competing against 223 other websites for this keyword that is why the SEO score is lower. This is not impossible to rank for, but definitely will make it a lot harder for a new website owner to compete for.
By choosing “What is Keyword Research in SEO” as my keyword, from the scores I might not get as much traffic, but I am actually more likely to get ranked higher for it as I only need to make sure my content is better than 43 competing websites.
So, I am more likely to rank on page one of Google with the longer keyword than the one with more monthly searches.
Ranking top spot on page one of Google is the holy grail for website owners. Statistically not many will go to page 2 or 3 for searches. Most will only check out the top one!
Using a keyword research tool allows you to highlight opportunities with long tail keywords. People type into the search engines what they are searching for, not just short words. They can be quite specific as it is really easy to type in a specific problem, i.e. “How do I fix a Broken Link on a Website?”
Typing this in shows that specific keyword does not get a lot of traffic, but the second one down shows that on average 64 people are looking for a way of fixing this problem but there are no sites targeting that keyword – this is what we call a low-hanging fruit.
At the moment, if you put that keyword term into Google, Google will show the next best answer for that keyword.
But if your niche was targeting that keyword and wrote an awesome post on it, you could get that top spot easily as there is no competition. Google searches content for relevance as well!
That is why Keyword Research is so important to Website Owners, Affiliate Marketers and Bloggers – Anyone with an online business!
The ideal figures are typically an Average score of over 100 (searches) and a QSR of less than 50 if you are just starting out and building up your authority, once you have become an authority you can start targeting more keywords.
Once you have started ranking, you may find you can change these goal posts, as sometimes when you do the research of what others have posted against those keywords – you might be able to write a better post that would be better received by readers.
At the end of the day, your content needs to be read by someone, so there are a couple of things you need to make sure you do when doing keyword research:
Keyword Research is a vital part of your online business and deserves respect and the right tool to help you not only get the right keywords but also make it easy to do on a scale. Starting out, one of the mistakes I did was find a keyword and then write an article, then find another keyword and so on. This is so inefficient and means you do not publish as many posts as you would like.
When starting out, if you can get keyword research done right and publish content on a regular basis you will find your rankings will definitely get a boost.
There are a few free keyword research tools out there, but they do not all stack up really.
Google do offer a free keyword tool as part of their AdWords (advertising) platform, but as this is aimed at PPC (Pay-Per-Click) unless you have a lot of money to play with this will not be enough to target SEO properly.
The best strategy for keyword research is to sit there and research keywords until you have around 50 low-hanging-fruit keywords to target. There you have 50 article ideas to write about. Get in the habit of doing some keyword research, doing some article research, then when you are ready to write articles – focus on putting everything else away (especially social media) and write.
It will definitely make you more efficient. Anyway, back to keyword research.
Without Keyword Research there would really be no point – but a recent report shows 60% of keywords are not being fully utilised so it shows how important you get your research correct and also shows the opportunity out there for those who do it seriously.
Any professional online business owner will tell you how important a keyword research tool is. They all may use a different one, but I would like to share with you the reasons behind why I recommend Jaaxy to a beginner and why it will transform your keyword research and make you work like a pro too.
Professionals use Jaaxy as well as it being ideal for beginners due to simplicity of the platform. Easy to Use, Quick Results & Awesome Tools.
Jaaxy is owned by the guys behind Wealthy Affiliate, it is incorporated into their WA platform for Premium Members. This has the added advantage of being part of the make-up of a training platform that has all of the tools required for an online business in one place. It also means that there are numerous training videos on how to master Keyword Research with Jaaxy.
One of the key things I needed when starting out with my first website was a way of keeping an eye on my niche, also what were people searching for in my niche. Jaaxy has a couple of great features that help you with this.
Alphabet Soup Technique – Type you chosen keyword into this and it will generate the A-Z of what people have been searching for. This gives you many different ideas of what you could target for content.
Search Analysis – Check out what other websites are also targeting that keyword you are after, get some great detail about their website.
Affiliate Programs – Affiliate Marketing is an awesome of earning income online, but know what programs are out there (that are genuine) in your given niche will be listed under this tab.
SiteRank – Know where your website is ranking for a given keyword with this tool.
A professional tool will always cost something, but the guys behind Jaaxy want you to experience it yourself before making any decision about investing money. The Starter membership allows you to do 30 keyword searches, no charge (no credit card required). Make up your own mind about whether Jaaxy is for you.
If you find Jaaxy is the keyword research tool for you, then there are a couple of membership offers. If you are new to online business and want to benefit from an awesome keyword research tool and all the help and support and tools that Wealthy Affiliate offer, then I do suggest you read my Wealthy Affiliate review.
Jaaxy is built into WA and when you scale up your business the enterprise membership is half price too.
But if you are starting out and want to benefit from awesome training, tools to build up a website and an excellent keyword research tool – Wealthy Affiliate has it all.
The foundations of building an online business rely heavily and good keyword research that is SEO friendly. Highly relevant content that is engaging and useful to the readers is really key, but if you do not do any keyword research it will be pot luck as to whether you rank for a post.
If you are still learning the ropes of an online business, you will find that there are many different options out there for a keyword research tool – so why should Jaaxy be any different to the others you may have found or are using, and the simple answer is the help and support that comes with it. Joining Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t just get you a keyword tool, it gives you access to a community of internet entrepreneurs that you can bounce ideas off of and ask for help at any time. Whether it be Keyword Research, SEO topics, WordPress, Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Selling Your Own Products online. There is so much on there to help you, including an awesome keyword research tool with some other abilities that make brainstorming ideas for your business so easy.
If you would like to try Jaaxy with some keywords, please try the plugin below – you will get 30 searches to make up your own mind:
If you would love to learn more about Wealthy Affiliate, here is my extensive review for you to learn more.
If you have any questions about keyword research or anything to do with an online business, please drop them in the comments below and I will definitely get back to you to help.
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