With so many people working from home due to the Covid 19 lockdowns as well as a huge number of people losing their jobs, there has been a drastic spike in the number of people looking for ways to earn money from home. Although there are a number of different methods that you are able to use ranging from dropshipping to social media influencing, I have personally earned my full-time income via blogging for years now.
One of the most important aspects of blogging is keyword research as it makes it easy to choose your battles and ensure that you only put your time and effort into articles targeting keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for. With there being so many beginner bloggers out there, I have decided to publish this article going over the three most beginner-friendly keyword research methods that I know to try and help as many people as possible get their blogs off the ground.
In reality, you should always use a mixture of keyword and article types to help protect your blog against potential problems in the future though. For example, buyer intent affiliate keywords have been specifically targeted by Google’s affiliate algorithm updates multiple times not. In the Google Core Algorithm Update for July 2021, they also seem to be trying to discourage catch-all articles with many people seeing a decrease in traffic. This is why spreading the risk with different keyword research methods and different article types can be so helpful.
Zero Search Volume Keywords
Targeting zero search volume keywords is one of the quickest and easiest methods to bring traffic to your blog and start earning money quickly. Although this type of keyword doesn’t bring much traffic, you should be aiming to start small as a beginner blogger and then work your way up. Getting some early traffic to your blog can give you the confidence that blogging can work for you and ensure that you don’t give up.
Although most keyword research tools will suggest that these keywords get no searches each month, they can actually bring a surprising amount of traffic with an average of 100 organic hits per zero search volume keyword being normal for me. Depending on how you choose to earn money from your blog, each of these articles can earn between $4 and $8 per month too and as you can publish them quickly, you can often churn them out.
Rather than go into detail on how you find zero search volume keywords in this article, I will just link you to my ultimate guide on zero search volume keywords instead that goes into far more detail. It goes into much more detail than I could in this short article and explains everything you need to find these keywords without you needing to purchase expensive keyword research tools.
Low Search Volume Low Competition Keywords
Targeting low search volume low competition keywords is another excellent strategy for beginners that can quickly deliver traffic. Ideally, you want to be targeting keywords will less than 100 searches per month according to tools like Keywords Everywhere as they tend to have the lowest competition but you can sometimes get lucky and find keywords with considerably more searches that still have low competition.
One of the best parts of this method is you don’t need any expensive keyword research tools either. The majority of people will simply use the free MozBar plugin and spend $10 on 100,000 credits for the Keywords Everywhere plugin to find hundreds of keywords for their blog. This is one of the most budget-friendly keyword research methods that you are able to use to your advantage as backlinks are rarely required if you do it correctly.
Once you have MozBar install, you should be looking for keywords that have a collection of user-generated sites such as Reddit, Quora or niche related forums on the first page of Google or domains with a domain authority of 20 or less on the first page of Google. This can suggest that the keyword will be low competition and easy to rank your own articles for within months of publishing them. I have the video below going over exactly how I find these keywords that you can watch for more information.
Keyword Research Tools
Each year more and more keyword research tools are released onto the market and the vast majority of them are a waste of time and effort. They almost always overcharge and underdeliver on what you get for your money with most keyword research tools delivering a huge number of false positives that they say are low competition but are actually medium or high competition.
I don’t recommend that you use keyword research tools if you are a beginner blogger as they often do more harm than good with people thinking that they are publishing content for easy to rank keywords when their keywords are higher competition. The lack of traffic then causes people to give up on blogging when all they had to do was use either of the methods above.
The Keyword Chef tool has been recently released onto the market that offers a quick and easy way to use the low search volume low competition method covered above at a much faster pace. This allows you to save a ton of time and process considerably more keywords than you would be able to if you were doing your keyword research manually. A common keyword research tool that is often recommended is AHRefs and although it is an excellent crawling tool for domain data, it is lacking in its keyword research ability in my opinion and I have the video below going over why I feel AHRefs is overrated for keyword research.
Conclusion
That concludes my article going over the three best beginner-friendly keyword research methods that I think people should be focusing on if they are new to blogging. In my opinion, the zero search volume keyword research method and the low search volume low competition keyword research method are more than enough for the majority of people who are new to blogging and should easily be able to get your blog off the ground. I still heavily use both methods as a full time blogger as they are a quick and easy way to get the initial traffic to your blog.
