How to Do Keyword Research for Content Creators

We believe in being honest and transparent at Creator Trail.

Building an audience is difficult – it does not happen overnight unless you have a huge marketing budget for advertising. You can only attract visitors to your website if you create content consistently.

Focus down on a niche

One of the biggest mistakes content creators make is not focusing on a niche and trying to be an expert in every topic within an industry.

For example, concentrate on ceramics or glass crafts instead of creating content for everything to do with crafts.

Yes, having a niche will reduce the size of your audience, but it’s easier to market a less competitive segment of an industry. You can branch out to other niches when you’ve built an audience.

With this aside, let’s jump into how to do keyword research for beginners.

Know your target audience

This article assumes you know your audience. If not, read our article on how to find your target audience as a content creator. Knowing this is fundamental to the success of your website.

What is Keyword research?

Keyword research is an essential task you will complete as part of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.

You want to attract your target audience to your website, and to do this, you need to research what keywords they are using to find content like yours.

Let’s pretend you have a vegan food blog and are writing an article on the best vegan dishes. You need to find a title that attracts readers to this topic.

How to do keyword research

Firstly, you need to find a title that gets a decent amount of searches but is not so competitive that you won’t appear on the first page of the search results. This is why keyword research is necessary: do it right, and you’ll build an audience, do it wrong, and you’ll end up with zero visitors to your website.

The first task is to go to the search engines – in this example, we will use Google because it’s the easiest to explain to beginners.

Type in ‘vegan food’ into the search engine.

You need to look out for two sections of the results page.

Look for a section titled “people also ask” and browse through the questions listed. Google is suggesting that these are highly searched questions. Can you see any that you can easily create content on?

In this example, there’s a question: What is the most popular vegan food?

Write this keyword search term down, along with any other questions.

Returning to Google search results for ‘vegan food’, scroll down the page and look for a section at the bottom titled ‘Related searches’. Again, Google suggests that these search terms are commonly used by its users.

At this point, you could create content based on the recommended questions and search terms by Google, but this next task will help you undercover more keywords that are not competitive and get searches.

Recommended keyword research tool

A keyword research tool will help you find search terms that will form part of your blog post title. Our preferred tool is ahrefs, which offers a free keyword generator tool to help you find keyword ideas in seconds.

Type in the initial search term ‘vegan food’ and select the country where your target audience is.

You will receive a list of standard search terms; in the next column is ‘keyword difficulty, which you need to check. Look for low scores in green because these get searches but aren’t too competitive.

Next, click on the ‘questions’ tab, and you will receive a list of terms that are searched for in Google. Write down all of the search terms you have found during this research, which should help you develop a title for your content.

For the free version, you will only receive data for the first 10 results, but this tool is so powerful, and we highly recommend upgrading.

Keyword research tool downsides

There are tons of keyword research tools, but no matter the tool, bear in mind that the data is coming in from different sources.

Just because the tool says that a keyword term gets zero searches doesn’t mean you should not use it.

At the end of the day, you know your audience better than anyone. Think about frequently asked questions that they ask you on social media. What challenges can you provide solutions on?

Really think about what keywords your audience would search to find the content that you have created.

Keyword research is a skill that takes time to learn, but you must spend time doing this task before creating the content.

In this article, we’ve focused on written content, but we’ll go into how to do keyword research for podcasts and videos in a future article.