This is a guest contribution from Tim Soulo.

First of all, don’t panic.

I’m not going to overwhelm you with time-consuming, overly complicated keyword research strategies. As a blogger myself, I appreciate actionable, no-nonsense techniques that help me start driving traffic, fast.

This post will outline one such technique.

I’m going to walk you through the keyword research formula I personally use to find relevant, highly targeted keywords – keywords that I know will actually send me a decent amount of search traffic.

So without further ado, here are three  aero leads simple steps you can follow to choose the most effective keywords for your articles!

Step #1: Brainstorm ideas

If you already have an idea burning a hole in your brain, you can just skip to step #2.

But if you’re experiencing “writer’s block”, you’ll likely appreciate a little bit of inspiration.

There are many ways to brainstorm ideas for future articles. My favorite strategy, however, is simply monitoring what people in my niche are talking about.

Some of the best places to do this are Reddit (search for relevant subreddits), Quora (they talk about many things, not just business and marketing), and of course industry forums.

Quora can help you find hot topics in just about any niche.

These sites can paint a clear picture of what people in your niche care about the most or struggle with. You’re likely to find tons of ‘hot’ topics and breaking industry news there.

Spend 20 minutes a day browsing these sites and taking notes of what catches your eye and you’ll never run out of great ideas for articles.

Step #2: Go from raw ideas to specific keywords

Step #1 only helped us to find some raw ideas to write about.

But if we’re looking to get traffic from search engines, we need to know the exact search phrases that people use to find these things that you’re going to write about.

Keyword tools are irreplaceable in this respect. Based on your “raw ideas” they will give you numerous related search terms that you can target with your articles.

There are many different tools to pick from, but I suggest going with Google’s native (and free) tool called Keyword Planner.

1. Plug your “seed keywords” into Keyword Planner

Start by selecting ‘Find new keywords and get search volume data’, and then ‘Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category’.

Next, plug in a few general phrases that you came up with in step #1. Click on the ‘Keyword ideas’ tab to get a list of related search terms.

Keyword Planner results for ‘roast turkey’

Look through the keyword suggestions to see if any jump out at you. If you like, you can always revise your original search based on any new keywords you’ve found.

2. Find keywords with good search volume

Your next step will be figuring out which updated 2024 mobile phone number data phrases receive a decent number of monthly searches to guarantee you some traffic from Google once you rank for them.

If your blog is fairly new, I would recommend sticking to longer-tail keywords with a maximum of 500 monthly searches.

After you notice that you’re consistently ranking in the top 5 for these phrases, you can start to target more popular/competitive ones.

3. Calculate how much traffic you’ll receive if you rank on page 1

While the Keyword Planner shows nola kalkulatu eta hobetu zure bezeroen atxikipen-tasa you a number of monthly searches, keep in mind that this is total searches – not the number of visitors you’ll get if you rank for this keyword.

The amount of visitors you will actually receive depends heavily on which spot you hold in the SERP. For instance, if you rank #1, you can expect more clicks than if you rank #3.

Fortunately, the folks at Advanced Web Ranking have figured out the estimated CTR for each of these positions (see the research here):

Image courtesy of Moz

In order to calculate how much traffic we’ll receive, we’ll use this simple formula:

(Search volume) x (click-through rate) = expected traffic

This means that if you manage to rank #1 for a keyword with 1600 searches per month, you can expect to get approximately 500 visitors coming to your site every month for that particular phrase.