Medium SEO 2021
Medium Keyword Research Can Help You Make Money in the Medium Partner Program
If Tim Denning uses keyword research, you should too.
There’s much conflicting advice out there about keyword research. I wrote a story, Do You Want to Know What Tim Denning’s Writing Secret Is? The short answer to that question is keyword research. His top keyword is “life fail.”
Some say you should only use Google Adwords, some say you should only look at Amazon, and some say you should never use the word “keyword” when searching for keywords.
This is a definitive guide to keyword research for SEO that will clear up any confusion and get you on your way to finding the right keywords for your next project.
How to do keyword research for SEO
Keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO. If you don’t do your keyword research, then you’re just throwing darts at aboard. Your keyword research should focus on 3 main things:
- high volume keywords,
- low competition keywords,
- and long-tail keywords.
Every SEO blog out there will tell you to avoid using competitive keywords at all costs, but this isn’t true for SEO, and I don’t know of any site out there that runs ads against the terms “non-competitive” or “non-keyword.” There are two reasons to avoid using competition-based keywords.
Conversely, if you do happen to find competitive search terms within your niche, you should be using these words in your content exactly as the search engines define them.
Competitive words are the keywords that get your content in front of the right people on Google and front of the right search query.
While most of us don’t have to contend with this level of competition all of the time, the more relevant keywords you include in your content, the more traffic you’ll give to your content, and the more organic traffic you’ll bring your site.
Let’s talk conversion rate optimization.
As most people understand it, conversion rate optimization is simply increasing the number of people who complete the desired action on your website.
Remember, your UX should be focused on your site visitors. That means solving their problems as best as you can, solving their problems right now, and converting them to repeat customers.
To increase the number of conversions on your site, you could, in theory, implement content marketing, ladders, A/B testing, email marketing, or content marketing automation. People try to solve problems independently, but they revert to ineffective hacks when they create their problems.
This isn’t to say that you should abandon all other methods of improving your site’s UX.
How to choose the right keywords
When it comes to SEO, choosing the right keywords is vital.
It’s the first step to getting your content in front of the people searching for it. But how do you know which keywords are the right ones to choose? The best thing to do is to think about what your target audience is searching for.
You’ll be surprised at which keywords convert the best.
Following this essential step will save you time and energy down the road. I’ve heard several people suggest that keywords should be a dry run for your entire website, but that isn’t true. I always like to dip into the back of my system many times before I am ready to launch my site, surface pages I remember, or randomly Google things I see.
Usually, there are two groups of terms you’ll be looking for before you even think about keywords.
Your niche keywords and your possible competitor keywords.
These two types of keywords will automatically get you started with your keyword research. This article is more about the topics and strategies that come before and after you pull keywords from all around the internet, but it’ll cover the basics as well.
The best is to have a dedicated domain for all your keywords. This will save you time and frustration because you won’t be distracted by Google.
I recommend creating a brand or business section that only has keywords related to your niche. “When researching keywords for landing pages and blog directories, people often use the site: [keyword]. Many people also forget about competitor:site: [keyword].
Keyword research tips
Keyword research is important for SEO, but it’s also a great way to get insight into what people are searching for and what they want to learn more about.
Regardless of what the experts say, if you don’t know what keywords, you don’t know where to look. And you risk driving traffic to irrelevant websites. I once made an unpaid webinar claim and spent all of my other social media time trying to figure out why people still believed that paid social media ads outperformed organic traffic.
It turned out that people couldn’t shake the idea that it wasn’t enough to run ads — you had to pay for it, too.
And social media ads depend on keywords to accomplish their goal and get people to stop scrolling and click through. So you have to stuff keywords in there somewhere.
Keywords are the cornerstone of digital marketing.
Keyword research helps you find phrases that are often used or roughly resemble one another within your niche. Your best keyword competitors will have things you could never compete with, like their keyword research’s complexity or authority with relevant search engines. They know their keywords better than you do.
Keyword research is fundamentally about getting to know your competitor’s keywords. Because they’re often the first thing people google when they think about your particular industry, they provide valuable insight for your content and content strategies. According to Moz’s research: “The more specific a piece of content is with its title, subtopics, and keyword choices, the better it will rank on Google’s site.
Common mistakes when doing keyword research
Keyword research is an important step in the content creation process. If you don’t research the competition for the keywords you want to rank for, you will have a hard time with SEO.
While we’re not going to cover all of the forms of keyword research that exist, we will touch on some of the most important elements to understand to create compelling content with the keywords you target.
Chances are, your competitor may try and produce excellent content but may do so in a way that results in a low-quality web page with many insufficient coding errors. To give you a rough idea of how pages will be indexed, Google tends to crawl the top third or top half of a page and then crawl down the page with a trust factor.
Why does Google crawl the top of the page?
This is just an easier way to visualize what a search engine view of a page will look like.
To get a sense of the likelihood that the URL will have the standard details maintained throughout its implementation, Google tends to crawl what they call the “head” of a page. This is the first element of a web page to be crawled. The head of the page is the element that directly affects search ranking.
Once the head of the page is a rendered HTML document, we know for sure that Google can render the HTML document, follow the HTTP response path to the hostname, resolve DNS resources, and a variety of other tasks that influence how and where search engine bots will find the target site.
The importance of meta titles and descriptions for SEO and conversion rate optimization.
Meta titles and descriptions are often overlooked as assets to your website, but they can really help boost your performance in search engines, as well as the click-through rate to your website.
Meta titles and descriptions are the titles and text that appear when people search for your business or product.
The best meta titles and descriptions will get you noticed by people searching “how-to,” “what it is,” and “what it isn’t.” It can also help with SEO when reviewing a site in an external source, like a link in an email or a blog post. Just like the meta title, the description should answer all questions that people might have about your brand and products.
This also gives the person SEO enough information to understand whether they should share your article or list your article on their social media platform of choice.
Final Words — On Tim Denning’s Keyword Research
To earn more money on the Medium Partner Program, it will take readers, and for you to reach your target readers, they need to know about your stories.
One way to do this is to optimize your content with the right keywords. It starts with good keyword research, and there are many ways to do it. It begins with knowing what your story is all about.
