Everything You Need to Know About Keyword Research for Content Marketing

How to Run Keyword Research for Content Marketing

Just any old keywords won’t do. You need to pick the right keywords for your audience, topics, and brand.

Understand How to Choose the Best Keywords

Before you can run effective keyword research for your content, you’ll need to understand what makes a keyword a good (or bad) choice to optimize.

Ideally, you’ll want to choose long-tail keywords – as opposed to broad keywords. Long-tail keywords typically contain three words or more and they’re a great choice because:

• You’ll have to fight against less competition.
• They’re more specific.
• They tell you more about the searcher’s intent aka why they searched and what they expect.
• The searcher is usually closer to making a purchase or completing an action.

Lots of marketers get caught up with search volume. However, high-volume keywords are typically short and not very descriptive of the searcher’s state of mind. In other words, it’s a challenge to optimize for these keywords. Think “red dress” compared to “patterns for a red summer dress.”

Research Your Seed Keywords

First, you’ll want to get some broad seed keywords together. Yes, we said long-tail keywords are better. BUT you can run research on broad keywords and narrow down your chosen ones to long-tail keywords based on the results.

Say you’re running a website that sells yoga mats. You’d type “yoga mats” into the BuzzSumo keyword research tool and voila: