As a blogger or website owner, you already know that creating fantastic content is crucial for your online presence. But that’s only half the battle. To truly succeed, you must ensure your target audience can discover your content. And that’s where niche keywords come to the rescue.
Niche keywords are specific words or phrases your target audience uses when seeking information online. By incorporating these keywords into your content, you can boost your chances of being found by the right people.
But how do you find these valuable niche keywords? In this blog post, we’ll explore some effective strategies for identifying the right keywords for your blog or website. Whether you’re just starting out or seeking to optimize your existing content, these tips will boost your keyword research efforts. So, let’s dive right in!
Table of Contents
Importance of Niche Keywords in Blogging
Niche keywords are used by your target audience when searching online for content. These niche keywords can include acronyms or jargon that your audience knows and understands.
For instance to the lay audience SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CTR (Click Through Rate) are meaningless but would be understood and searched for by bloggers, copywriters and website owners.
Using niche keywords helps establish you as an authority in your field, boosting your credibility and expertise in the niche.
Google’s algorithm looks for signs of Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T or “double eat”).
Google looks for signs that you have an in-depth understanding of a topic – this indicates you can provide highly accurate and informative answers to users’ queries. Using niche keywords demonstrates to Google that you possess extensive knowledge of the niche and can use relevant keywords, acronyms, and jargon specific to the topic and niche.
Incorporating niche keywords and attracting your target audience to your blog further confirms to Google that you are an expert in this topic and niche. This boosts engagement and establishes your authority in the niche, enhancing your reputation with Google.
Over time, if you manage to reach and stay on the first page of Google search results, you will acquire backlinks from other sites, elevating your authority and trustworthiness.
The benefits of targeting niche keywords are:
- Increase search visibility. Using keywords people are searching for will boost increase your search traffic
- Better attract your target audience: By using technical terms, phrases, acronyms and keywords used by your target audience you attract more of them to your site
- Authority: By consistently focusing on keywords used by your target audience you establish yourself as someone with authority and credibility
To give an example, a blog post on “Downward facing dog” doesn’t mean much to most people, but, if you practise yoga you will recognise it as a yoga pose and yoga practitioners may be searching for that term.
Difference between Broad and Niche Keywords
Broad keywords are general words or phrases that describe a wide range of topics. For example, let’s consider the following keywords:
- money
- money advice
- how to make money
- how to make money online
- how to make money online using cryptocurrencies
The first keyword is very broad and not a useful keyword, the second is also broad and only the most vague and general advice could be given.
The third, fourth and fifth keywords contain more context and would make good blog articles. The more keywords the easier it is to answer the query because you have more context. On the other hand, you will have smaller search volume the longer the keyword is.
You need to strike a balance between longer and easier keywords to target and the smaller search volume you receive. Typically, you will focus on keywords with 3-5 words.
The length of the keyword is linked to search intent, which is another crucial concept to understand. We’ll dive deeper into that topic later in this article.
Carrying out Keyword Research
When brainstorming keywords for a new blog article, you have two main approaches to consider. Let’s explore both of them.
Broaden your content
Find brand new topics within your niche you haven’t written about before.
The idea is to broaden your blog to cover as many topics within your niche as possible. For example, if you blog about yoga, you might want to write articles about:
- every yoga pose and variation
- yoga for children, busy people, senior citizens, overweight, lacking in mobility etc.
- types of yoga
- yoga history
- yoga gear
- advice on stretching, flexibility, mobility etc
That’s just a starting point, there are probably many other topics and areas you could write about.
Deepen your content
Find related keywords to your existing content.
Take one of your previously written articles and examine it to find areas you haven’t covered in detail that would make an interesting related article.
Keyword discovery tools will help you find related keywords. You don’t want to duplicate what you have written previously but go into detail on a related topic or idea from the existing article.
For instance, if you have written an article on optimizing images for your website, you could consider the following related articles:
- Cropping images
- Scaling images
- Compressing images
- Changing the format of images
- How image sizes affect page load times
These are related to the original article. Once you have written the new article you can include internal links from the new article back to the original article and visa-versa.
Using keyword discovery tools
I’ve written about keyword discovery tools before. First, let’s discuss why you should use a keyword discovery tool and then what metrics to use when conducting keyword research.
Why use keyword discovery tools?
Because without using a keyword discovery tool you are left guessing what keywords to target. Now, of course, you can make reasonable assumptions about your niche and what important topics you should cover.
However, there’s a problem – some of those keywords might be impossible for you to rank based on how established your website is. Targeting such keywords would be a waste of your valuable time.
On the other hand, you might end up targeting keywords that nobody is searching for. This would also be a waste of your time and effort.
The focus should be on:
- Niche keywords used by your target audience
- Keywords that give you enough context to answer well (3-5 words typically)
- Low difficulty
- High search volume
- Low competition
These are the most important metrics when doing keyword research. For your niche, you may have other considerations. For example if your competitors heavily use paid ads you may want to target keywords that don’t have ads by modifying or rephrasing the keywords to avoid your competitors ads showing up.
Personally, I use SE Ranking keyword discovery tool. You can perform a small number of keyword searches for free. Use the widget below to generate a keyword research report to see what information is available. For example, type “keto diet”:
Understanding User Intent
User intent is also sometimes called search intent. This phrase refers to the underlying intention of the user when they queried the search engine.
Did they seek information, conduct research, or have commercial intent? For a more in-depth discussion of search intent, please refer to this article: A guide to search intent for bloggers.
A quick summary of the different types of search intent:
- Informational: Provides a basic introduction to a topic.
- Research: Offers more detailed and in-depth information on a topic.
- Commercial: Indicates an interest in potentially purchasing a product or service.
- Transactional: Involves the process of deciding which product or service to buy.
It’s crucial to grasp search intent and tailor your content to address the underlying motivation behind each query.
Avoiding Keyword Stuffing and Over-Optimization
It’s tempting to use every SEO tactic you can think of when writing online content. The problem is you are focusing on the search engines instead of your readers. Google wants you to write people-first content, if Google thinks you content is overly optimized it will be penalized – the opposite of what you want.
Instead, aim to write naturally and with your readers in mind. Providing high-quality content that caters to your target audience is the best approach for long-term ranking success. Short-term attempts to manipulate Google may backfire, potentially leading to your site being removed from the search index.
For more insights into the consequences of Click Through Rate (CTR) manipulation, you can explore: Click Through Rate Manipulation Explained.
Write for humans not search engines.
Final Thoughts
I hoped you found this article informative.
Here is a quick recap:
- niche keywords are used by your target audience when searching online
- niche keywords signal to Google you are an expert in the niche
- broaden your content by writing about new topics in your niche
- deepen your content by writing about related topics in your niche
- understand the importance of user intent when writing content
- don’t over-optimize or stuff keywords into your content
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