Researching the right keyword for a blog post is often the first step taken when writing.

Keyword research is still a very important aspect of search engine optimization and bringing in new organic, inbound traffic.

You come up with an article idea.

You head over to your favorite keyword research tool.

You plug in your seed keyword.

It spits out a stream of results.

You check the parameters we’re “supposed” to check...

You go through this same process a few (or many) times until you finally find a “decent keyword”.

You’ve found a keyword that “fits” in with everything.

Basically, you pimp your article!

You write the article.

You do all your fancy stuff with images, videos, internal & external links, and some more SEO stuff.

You PIN it, Facebook it, Twitter it, and Instagram the hell out of it.

Aahhh! Satisfaction.

You wait a couple of days, a week, a month, 3 seasons, 7 lockdowns…

The article indexed ages ago, but as for rankings, as for traffic, hmm, not so much.

My favorite keyword research tool lied to me...

You told me that there were only 13 other competing websites.

You told me that the SEO was “GOOD”.

You promised me traffic.

In 5 months the only people who have checked out my perfectly optimized article are my girlfriend’s mum, and my cat Felix, who jumped in front of me while I checked the stats of this article, actually only to get some attention from me.

Life is so unfair.

So, what’s going on here?

Google Tells You Everything You Need to Know

There’s definitely no chicken and egg argument for Google and keyword tools.

Google definitely came before the keyword tool.

Google has matured over several years.

She is no longer a child or a stroppy teenager.

Google will be 23 this year.

So, she is currently thinking about her thesis for her Master’s.

Therefore, Google is pretty clever.

So much so, that at age 22 years, Google now tells you what people are ACTUALLY searching for online.

6.191.474.120 new articles ideas that might rank.

I had a quick check on Internet Live Stats prior to writing this article and it informed me that 6.191.474.120 searches Google had in the last 24 hours.

Each one of those 6.191.474.120 searches is a potential keyword phrase.

Each one is a potential article you could write.

Each one has the potential to rank or not to rank.

Each one of those searches can bring you a shed load of traffic or absolutely none.

However, the article ideas you could come up with are mind-boggling.

How to use Google and your keyword research tool

You type in some letters...preferably your keyword(s) you found with your keyword research tool.

Let's take a look at my favorite keyword research tool, Jaaxy.

A feature I like a lot is the alphabet soup, where you basically put your seed keyword into the Google search bar and then typing a, b, c, d, all the way through to z - before, in the middle, or after your keyword phrase.

Try this free tool yourself

Google will then make suggestions based on those keywords or keyword sentences...we know this as Google autosuggest.

The suggestions that Google comes up with are not simply plucked out of thin air.

NO.

The suggestions are based on what people have ACTUALLY been typing into Google’s search bar.

Check out page one of the results. Which websites are ranking for that keyword (or keyword sentences).

If it’s full of authority websites, it could be advisable to move on.

Simply because almost every keyword is too competitive. It can take hours upon hours to find a non-competitive one if those even exist anymore.

However, you should still study page one before you decide to move on.

After the first few search results on page one, Google provides a “People Also Ask” section.

You click on these results and you get more and more and more results.

The more you click, the more results will appear.

Once again, Google is suggesting the “People Also Ask” section because, yep, you’ve guessed it, real people are actually asking these questions on Google.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see the “related searches” section.

Yet again, Google is actually TELLING YOU what searches real people are making on their search engine.

So, you can check out all the “people also ask” and “related searches” and see who’s ranking on page one.

As for traffic, well you have no real idea here of what traffic to expect.

But remember, Jaaxy and other keyword tools are only guessing/estimating.

There are actually much more important things to focus on...

For blogging, keyword research shouldn’t be your primary focus anymore.

There are more important things at stake that will truly separate your content from the rest.

Now don’t get me wrong, keyword research isn’t dead.

It’s still a very important aspect of search engine optimization and bringing in new organic, inbound traffic.

But for blogging, it shouldn’t be your primary focus anymore.

According to the research of my favorite keyword research tool, Jaaxy.  we should instead focus on beginner content.

Think of "how to" blog posts. As their research shows beginner content on average gets 3.68x more SEO traffic than advance content.

All the best,

Luc

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