Discover the Best Local Keywords for Blog Post Ideas Part 1

Discover the Best Local Keywords for Blog Post Ideas Part 1, written by Jaco Grobbelaar of BroadVision Marketing

You have come up with some great blog post ideas based on what your clients have asked. You have a good idea what your clients need to know from studying your market segment. But before you turn these blog post ideas into articles, you want to make sure that your articles are going to find their way to the right audience.

How do you do that? You need to find just the right local keyword phrase to position a series of your blog post ideas on the first or second page of a Google search. Here is the way many people search for a business or blog post idea information:

The keyword phrase we used here was “riding lawn mower tires Petaluma.”

You have heard about keywords, but you might be a little uncertain as to what they are or why they so are important. Let’s look at why you need very specific keywords. Don’t worry. This isn’t rocket science.

Keywords are key to a search

Keywords are links in a chain. They connect your blog post ideas within your website to search engines. When the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) crawl your website page to index it, the engines parse or closely examine the keywords so that they can determine what your article is about.

Indexing the information is just like what it sounds like—the search engine puts the information into something similar to a physical index box. They can hold very specific information this way.

When a person who is interested in something does a Google search using certain words, the search engine looks for those words in the index and connects the person with a list of articles.

As you can see the keywords you chose for your website blog post are the link. Since the latest Google innovation made the massive search engine more user friendly, we need to make sure that we have the right kinds of keywords to ensure that when a person asks a question, our keyword will pop up.

This is called a semantic search and you can read more about it in our article Another Keyword Article about Google Hummingbird and SEO Part 2.

So it is very important that you discover the best keywords to attract the clients through doing keyword research. The right keyword can make your business and the wrong one can have disastrous results. Getting the keywords right is a big part of creating those great articles out of your blog post ideas. But how do you find the right keywords?

Here are the first search results below the ad section for the query about riding lawn mower tires Petaluma we asked above:

BTW, if you have keyword phrases nailed down, you might be interested in some of the other best business blogging practices we talk about in our new, free guide “An Introduction to Business Blogging.”

Keyword Research is fun with the right mindset 

1. I want you to forget every scary thing you have ever heard about doing keyword research. It’s like going on a treasure hunt. Plus there are many tools available to help you out. Some are free, others are costly and some are in between.

If you are just starting your business, you will want to go for the free ones; but if you have an established business, I suggest you check out the others. Why? Because the ones that cost will save you some steps in the process. 

You can jump in the shallow end and get words that are good enough or you can dive into the deep end and get even more specific help. Either way you will be ahead of where you are now. And you are going to want to do some a/b testing to see what keywords work. Therefore, know that nothing you decide is set in stone.

2. I want you to remember is that there are a two simple things (treasure hunt clues) to keep in mind. More on this in our next article.

3. You need to know that keywords go from general words to keyword phrases that are extremely specific like the one we did.

If you want to attract people that want exactly what you have to offer, you have to find very specific keywords, called long tail keyword phrases. Long tail keyword phrases are more complex than just a simple keyword and are more specifically about what your business is, sells or is located.

• For example, if you are selling riding lawn mower tires, you could go with a general keyword “tires.” But there are probably hundreds of thousands of blog post articles writing about tires. Chances that someone will find your business using the keyword “tires” are slim to none.
• If, on the other hand, you sell riding lawn mower tires from the small mowers to the big riding ones, you would do a lot better to use a keyword phrase like “riding lawn mower tires Husqvqarna.”
• If you are a brick and mortar store in Petaluma, you might use “riding lawn mowers Petaluma.” Let’s say that you find this seems to be a good keyword phrase, you will want to use it for some of your blog post ideas. The longer the phrase, the better. These long tail keywords are what we want to research in order to find the best.

How do you know if you have a good keyword phrase? In Discover the Best Local Keywords for Blog Post Ideas Part 2 we will get into the non-rocket science way to figure out which keywords are the best. I promise you this is not difficult.

In the meantime please feel free to get a copy of our new guide “An Introduction to Business Blogging”.