The Beginner’s Guide to Find Keywords that Increase Your Traffic and Sales 

Some people get a lot of traffic from search engines while others hardly get any search traffic.

I know how frustrating it is to see your website die with lack of traffic. Are you wondering why your site is not getting enough traffic from Google even though you are writing great content?

If you are one among them, this detailed guide is for you where I’m going to discuss about the most important metric of a successful blog: keyword research.

What is Keyword Research?

Keywords are the search terms people type on Google search results. If you are targeting the right keywords on your sites, it can help you bring more traffic if you they are ranking in top 10 results.

The reason why most people don’t get enough search traffic is because either they don’t do any keyword research or they pick keywords that are impossible to rank for.

How are you supposed to get more traffic from Google if your web pages are not targeted by the keywords that your target audience are searching for?

Proper keyword research is the key to increase your overall website traffic.

How to Find Better Keywords to Increase Your Traffic and Sales?

So how can you find great keywords that help you increase your website organic traffic? The key here is to choose the long tail keywords.

So what are they? Long tail keywords usually contain 3 or more words.

“SEO tips for real estate agents” is a really good long tail keyword (with 5 keywords in it) whereas “SEO tips” is a 2 words keyword which is almost impossible to rank for if you have a new blog or website.

Are you getting me?

The importance of long tail keywords

Long tail keywords can help you increase your search traffic quickly even if you have a brand new website without much backlinks.

Long tail keywords will not only increase your traffic but more importantly your website sales. If people are typing really detailed keyword phrases on Google to visit your site, your chances of converting them into sales will be really higher.

Why should you use long tail keywords?

As I said above, long tail keywords can quickly increase your traffic. Here are few more advantages of using long tail keywords while doing keyword research for your content.

• They are easier to rank for
• They can send you more search traffic (because of variety of keywords)
• They will send you “targeted visitors” who are interested in your stuff
• When doing paid advertising, they cost you less per click
• They increase your overall site authority

Are you convinced about using long tail keywords now? Let’s now talk about how can you find great keywords.

For beginners, I highly recommend to start using few SEO tools as they can make your keyword research much easier.

Tools That are highly Recommended for Beginners

Keyword Planner: Google Keyword Planner is widely used by almost every SEO enthusiast. Not only the tool is free but it is highly recommend for beginners to start their keyword research journey.

Keyword planner also helps you find the ad groups for targeting PPC campaigns along with the keyword research. You need to sign into your AdWords account to start using Keyword Planner which can be seen under the “Tools and Analysis” tab.

Long Tail Pro: Long Tail Pro is the most effective tool for doing keyword research. Unlike Keyword Planner, you can use this tool for finding really great keywords that are less competitive.

The problem with Keyword Planner is that even if you find less competitive keywords it’s really hard to get high search rankings because almost everyone else also using the same free tool. This is where premium tool like Long Tail Pro comes into play with much more advanced features when compared to Keyword Planner.

Keywordtool.io: This tool is considered as the best alternative to Google Keyword Planner as it has more advanced features and also comes at premium version for more features.

This tool gives you more than 750 keyword variations for every keyword you type on it. It also uses Google autocomplete feature to generate long tail keyword ideas for your desired keywords.

Let’s now talk in detail about how you can actually use both Google’s Keyword Planner and Long Tail Pro to find keywords that increase your search traffic and website sales.

Using Keyword Planner for doing keyword research

Step 1: Once you logged into your Google AdWords account, click on Keyword Planner under Tools tab.

Step 2: Enter your desired keywords under “Find new keywords” tab.

Step 3: You also need to select the demographics while entering the keywords you want to rank for. Then, click on Get Ideas to continue.

Step 4: You will now have to click on “Keyword Ideas” tab to get the list of all the keywords. Carefully select the keywords with low to medium competition to rank higher in the search engines easily.

In the above screenshot, you can clearly see that the highlighted keywords have really low monthly searches with medium competition. These are the keywords you need to target if you want to increase your search traffic. Now, let’s talk about how you can do keyword research using Long Tail Pro tool.

Using Long Tail Pro to find profitable keywords

Step 1: Once you signed into Long Tail Pro dashboard, create a project to add keywords.

Step 2: Now, enter any keywords of your choice and select the search volume between 100 to 1000 searches for best results.

Step 3: Once you click on the Generate Keywords button, you will get all the long tail keywords you can use to increase your traffic.

Please make sure to check out this detailed tutorial on doing keyword research with Long Tail Pro if you want to know more information about it.

By using the same tutorial mentioned above, you can find incredible keywords using any keyword research tool you can imagine. I know there are a lot more keyword research tools available such as UberSuggest, SEMrush, WordStream, Moz tools etc.

I don’t recommend you to invest too much money on such tools especially when you are a beginner. As a newbie to SEO, you need to use less tools that are cost effective. Once you start getting good results, you can start investing more into SEO.

How much time does it take to get traffic from Google to your sites?

One of the common questions most people ask while doing keyword research is: how long does it take to see Google’s traffic to their sites. It really depends on your niche. If you are writing about the trending topics, you can see traffic coming from Google within a day or two.

If you are writing contents in extremely crowded topics like marketing, real estate etc., it usually takes some time (weeks to months) to see traffic coming to your blogs from Google. The point you should remember is, it generally takes time to increase your traffic from Google.

Google usually don’t trust new sites. They always give high priority and high search rankings to the authority sites with lots of backlinks. So if you want to quickly boost your organic traffic for a new site, you need to build quality backlinks.

Here are two most effective ways to build links without violating Google’s guidelines.

Writing posts for others: As you can see, this is a guest post written by me for other blog. This is the most effective way of building backlinks. But you need to remember that using guest posting as a link building strategy won’t work.

If you notice, I’ve put a lot of time and research in creating this post. Most people don’t do research and they write guest posts just for the sake of getting links. If you are one among, stop doing right now. Guest posts should be used as relation building not as link building.

Here are few tips for you if you want to get the most out of guest blogging.

• Don’t use crappy posts as your guest posts. Most beginners do this all the time. They keep the best posts with them and give away the mediocre stuff to other blogs as guest posts. What’s the point in writing crappy posts that add no value to others? Always write the most informative posts and give it away for others so you both can benefit.
• Always read the guidelines of the blog that you want to write guest posts for. Overdeliver them.
• Link out to other valuable articles from your guest posts. Make sure to email the people whom you have linked to. Sooner or later, they will start linking to your own blog posts too.
• Always write keyword rich articles. Make sure to do proper keyword research even for your guest posts. Use your primary keywords in title, meta description, image alt tags, subheadings and few other places to rank them well in search results.

Email outreach: Connections are everything online. If you know few top bloggers in your niche, it becomes extremely easy for you to get a lot of backlinks from them. All you need to do is to capture their attention by writing extraordinary posts that are relevant to their site audience.

Here are few effective ideas on using email outreach to build quality links.

• Writing compelling subject lines is the key to get the most out of email outreach. Make sure to spend quality time on writing great subject lines that are short and effective.
• Always write emails by mentioning the blog owners name. Don’t write bulk emails. Always personalize your emails if you want to get responses.
• Always ask yourself “what’s in it for them” while writing emails for others. If you don’t provide them a reason, they won’t respond. Most top bloggers get a lot of emails every single day so your chances of getting responses from them will be slim if you don’t give them a reason or benefit.
• Proofread your emails before pitching. By writing emails with typos, you will build bad reputation. Always follow up. If you don’t get a reply even after a week, you can send a gentle reminder. Most of the times, you will get a better response rate while following up through emails.

Bonus Video: Two tools to help with Email Outreach – Full Contact and Discoverly extensions for Chrome

Final Thoughts about Keyword Research

Both keyword research and building backlinks are two most important factors that determine your overall search traffic. You can’t increase your traffic or sales by ignoring either of them.

Create content that is focused on your readers. If you satisfy your audience, you will definitely get rewarding results by Google. Just make sure to use the right combination of keywords while creating content. And use those keywords throughout your content to get higher rankings.

That’s the reason why I’ve given you how to perform keyword research using 3 widely used tools. Also make sure to spend quality time on building links for your sites by using ethical methods such as guest blogging, email outreach, creating Infographics etc.

So what are your thoughts on keyword research? Do you have any more tips on finding better keywords that increase your search traffic and website sales? Please share them in the comments and share this guide if you find it useful.