Do you want more visitors from the search engines? Wouldn’t it be great if your blog posts received hundreds or even thousands of targeted visitors each month from Google and other search engines?

While search engines aren’t the only source of traffic to your blog, they’re definitely one of the most important. According to research, a whopping 51% of all traffic comes from organic search!

In this article, you'll learn how to increase blog traffic with targeted keywords. We’ll discuss how keywords help you and then take you through some basic keyword research methods you can use right away to get started.

Getting a lot of organic traffic from search engines can be difficult – but it’s definitely possible if you focus on a couple of key things…

What is a keyword?

Before we go any further, let’s quickly discuss what a keyword actually is.

In short, they are the words and phrases that people type into the search box to find content on the web. An example is “top blogging tips” or “restaurants in London.”

Longer and more specific keyword phrases are called long-tail keywords – for example: “How to increase blog traffic with targeted keywords.”

Some keywords are highly competitive and may bring up thousands or even millions of results, while others may be contained on just a handful of websites.

By finding targeted keywords and inserting them into your blog content, you can greatly increase the amount of traffic you receive from search engines.

How do keywords help me to increase traffic?

In short, keywords help your blog content to be more visible when people search for terms that are related to your blog. By regularly publishing high-quality content based around specific keywords, you can begin to rank well for those topics and see an increase in organic search engine traffic over the long-term.

It’s not a magic solution – but it does work. The trick is to choose the right keywords and incorporate them into your content in the right way.

Basic keyword research

Knowing how to increase blog traffic with targeted keywords requires some knowledge of basic keyword research. Before you begin writing any content, you need to know exactly what keywords you want to target.

As we have already mentioned, choosing the right keywords is absolutely critical to your success. Some keywords are so competitive that you have little or no chance of ranking well for that keyword!

So, how do you get started?

You can use a tool such as Ahrefs to do in-depth keyword research. If you have an active AdWords campaign, you can also use Google’s Keyword Planner – but please note that this is no longer available to free account holders.

1. If you are using Ahrefs, head to the Keywords Explorer and type in a general keyword that is related to the topic of your blog – for example, “healthy juices.”
2. The tool will provide you with a list of related keywords – for example, “healthy juices to drink,” “juicing for weight loss” and “green juice recipes.”
3. You will see detailed information about each keyword, including the monthly search volume, clicks per search and a “keyword difficulty” score. This score aims to help you determine how difficult it might be to rank in the top 10 of search results for that term.
4. To get more keyword ideas, type some of these initial ideas back into the search box and find additional suggestions.

The ideal keyword will have a healthy monthly search volume, while also having low-to-medium competition. Look for long-tail keywords that contain four or more keywords, as these are generally considered easier to rank for.

By this stage, you should have a list of initial keyword ideas that are relevant to your blog. The longer you spend doing this, the more ideas you’ll come up with!

There is of course much more to keyword research – but that should help you to get started.

Developing content

Once you have selected a suitable keyword, you can then write up a blog post based around that keyword.

A big mistake made by many newbies is to include the keyword in the article too many times. This is called keyword stuffing and can result in Google penalizing your website, so make sure you don’t do it! Aim for high-quality, readable content, with one keyword phrase included in the text a couple of times.

As a guide, each post should have a keyword density of somewhere between 0.5 and 2.5%.

Conclusion

Successfully ranking for relevant keywords is all about selecting the right long-tail keywords and then developing high-quality, useful content to post to your blog. Do that over the long-term and you can start to significantly increase the search traffic to your blog.

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Vanessa Pruitt, PLMHP, MS

Vanessa is a Provisionally Licensed Mental Health Practitioner in Nebraska and holds an MS in Clinical Psychology. She is a certified trauma professional with a special interest in helping people heal from trauma, complex trauma, feeding and eating disorders.

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