This is a question I see many people asking that are just starting out with blogging and keyword research. It’s easy to find keywords and topic ideas, they’re everywhere and there are dozens of ways to discover them. Where people get tripped up is deciding which ones they should go after. Is it too competitive? Will I ever rank for it? And of course: How do you know if a keyword is good?
Below is a quick mental checklist I go through on the fly, as I’m in the browser looking at auto-suggestions and deciding which keywords to target. I like to check as many of these boxes as I can when choosing topics for my niche sites.
How do you know if a keyword is good?
1. Good search volume
Without enough search volume then it’s a waste of resources to create the content, plain and simple. So I usually start here. I don’t always require high search volume, that’s really different for each site. There needs to be enough volume though that I have a decent chance on seeing a return on my content investment. It’s different for everyone and every site.
There are many tools out there than give you an estimation of search volume, I use the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and it does a good enough job. My rank tracker, SERP Robot, gives me some data as well.
Aside from these tools, which are not always accurate, there are a couple of other ways you can decide if there’s enough search volume to warrant an article being written. Ways such as:
- If multiple variations of the 0 volume keyword are being auto-suggested by Google. This can indicate search volume.
- If common sense tells you that it’s probably being searched a lot (sometimes you have to trust your gut).
Once I’m sure there some volume then I’ll see if it checks any other boxes.
2. Search intent
Sometimes a keyword appears to have intense competition and you quickly toss it aside as potential topic. However if you were to look closely at all of those authoritative sites on the first page you’d have seen that they were all accidentally ranking for a keyword that they weren’t even targeting. I can usually tell if they were or not just by their titles, so I don’t even have to read the articles.
In a case like this, a well written article with a good SEO title and that nails the search intent, could easily grab a spot on the first page. Maybe even the snippet. Even for newer sites many times. Search intent is the single most important thing I look for when judging competition. How well the competition fulfilled the searchers needs.
It’s up to me as the SEO and site owner to decide what that searcher is actually looking for, and my interpretation may be different than my competition’s. We both create content that fulfills the intent as best as we can. May the best man win. Unfortunately it’s not that cut and dry, but you get the idea. It’s all about nailing search intent better than the other guy.
3. Commercial intent
This one is not a must, but I do consider commercial viability when looking at keywords. By commercial I mean product-related. Basically can I potentially recommend any products in an article on this topic. I monetize everything with ads, but not everything gets affiliate links. That takes a special type of content. Content with commercial intent.
The reader that lands on the article needs to already be in a state of buyer readiness. So that when I recommend a product there’s a chance they would buy it using my affiliate link and I’d get a commission.
Affiliate commissions are nice to get, but they only make up a small part of total income these days. I’m able to scale up so much quicker with pure informational posts. So I often don’t even worry about this when choosing topics at all.
4. Top 3 results quality
When judging competition, sometimes I’ll scan over the entire first page of results. Other times I’ll even venture onto the second page just to see what’s there. Most of the time though I just click on the top 3 results, if the keyword has made it this far in my analyzation process.
I’m again looking for if the author of the article hit my interpretation of the search intent for the keyword, but I’m also scanning for a couple of other things. Things like article formatting, article age, grammar, and overall article quality.
I can usually recognize poor quality articles right away. If I think it’s poor quality for various reasons, it didn’t hit the search intent, but it’s a big site with a DR of 65, then I still might go after it.
So if the top 3 results for a given keyword aren’t impressing me and it checks enough other boxes, then it often gets added to the queue.
5. Secondary keywords
How much potential for additional longtail keyword traffic would an article have? Sometimes the topic I’m eyeing only has a search volume of 170/mo. I dig a little deeper and find that if I approach the topic from a certain angle, I can hit on 25 other sub-topics and bring in loads more traffic.
Sometimes thinking outside the box a little pays off. You want to make sure your article stays focused, but not too focused that you miss out on some potential traffic. There’s a fine line to walk and it’s always changing.
Summary
This was just what I could think of off the top of my head, but these are all important factors to consider. Just remember though, in the end what’s most important is to be able to publish as often as possible. So don’t spend too much time deciding whether or not you should, instead hit publish and move on.
Test different types of keywords and search volume ranges. When you find what works for you your own topic selection checklist will begin to form.