This post was updated on December 17, 2022.

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Do search engines rank highly on your list of ways to generate blog traffic?

Pun intended.

I'm asking you this question because far too often, I see bloggers who are relying solely on social media for their traffic - and I get it. Generating traffic through social media is easy and you can see the results immediately.

However, social media traffic is not sustainable. After sharing your blog post on social media, it only takes a few hours - sometimes minutes - to disappear from people's feeds. So, unless you have the time to promote your content on social media constantly, you need to focus on other means of getting traffic to your blog. Like, search engines.

If you’re totally new to the world of SEO, I highly recommend reading my SEO for Beginners Guide (updated in December 2022).

Read this guide to find out how to get search engine traffic to your blog, how to find keywords for your blog posts, and how to get your blog on the front page of Google.

Let's dive in!

What are keywords?

Keywords define what your blog posts are about. Think of them like the topics or ideas behind your actual content. Your keywords are going to be the words and phrases that people search for online in order to find your blog posts.

There are two types of keywords:

Head Keywords: these are short and broad terms like "blogging tips" or "budget travel"
Long-Tail Keywords: these are highly specific phrases like "blogging tips for new bloggers" or "best budget travel destinations in 2017".

Ultimately, you should try your best to use long-tail keywords, but we'll talk more about that in a minute.

What are the benefits of using keywords?

Keywords are going to bring you and your target audience together.

Your audience is out there but you have to help them find you. This can be achieved through search engine optimization. Use keywords in your blog posts that allow your audience to find you. This is a little trickier than it sounds because you have to use the right kind of keywords.

Your blog will naturally rank on search engine result pages (also called SERPs) for a variety of keywords. You want to use strategically placed keywords in your content to help determine which SERPs your post will rank on and ultimately have a say in the type of traffic you get.

Let’s say you have a blog about birds and you write a post about the different types of cranes. If you’re not selective with your keywords, you might end up bringing in traffic from people who are interested in construction.

The goal is to rank highly on search engines and drive people who are actually interested in your content to your blog. To do this, you have to find out what type of content your audience wants and what kind of language or phrases they are using to look for it.

Why should you focus on long-tail keywords?

It can be tempting to use head keywords in your blog posts. After all, there are so many people searching for these short keywords every month, that it makes sense to use them in your content… right?

Wrong.

Head keywords are highly competitive and almost impossible to rank for in search engines. Sure, you might want your travel blog to rank for the keyword "travel tips" - but it's going to be tough trying to rank above BBC and Rick Steves.

Long-tail keywords are specific and well-defined. And they usually contain a minimum of three words. Like "Best Small Towns in Poland" or "Eastern Canada Road Trip Itinerary" for example. These keywords also have way less competition - typically under 200 searches per month. This means it will be much easier for your blog to rank higher on SERPs.

With a keyword research tool.

There are many options out there, including SEMrush, ahrefs, and my personal favorite: KWFinder. It’s one of the easiest and least expensive keyword research tools out there.

What is KWFinder?

KWFinder is a tool that will help you find popular keywords with low competition that are related to your niche. Essentially, it will help you rank higher - as on the first page - in search engines like Google.

It’s a part of Mangools, which is a suite of keyword research and SEO tools, including KWFinder, SERPChecker, and SERPWatcher. These other two tools are used to check the search engine results of your competitors and to track your own progress. I'll talk more about them later on.

For now, we'll focus on the star of the Mangools show, KWFinder.

How much does KWFinder cost?

The KWFinder plans start at $29 per month but there is a free 10-day trial.

This free trial includes 5 keyword lookups per 24 hours. To put that in perspective, I make anywhere from 10 to 25 keyword lookups per blog post.

I use the Basic Plan, which includes 100 keyword lookups per day, plus the entire suite of tools. This plan costs $29 per month and you can read about it here. While this may seem expensive, the majority of other keyword research tools are well over $50 per month - and some of those only include 10 keyword lookups per day. Obviously, search engine rankings don’t come cheap.

You can sign up for the free trial of KWFinder here and see if it makes a difference in your SEO and keyword strategies.

How to Find Long Tail Keywords Using KWFinder

Now that you have an idea of the importance of keywords and how KWFinder can help you find them, I’m going to give you a little tutorial on how to use this awesome tool.

So, when you open up KWFinder, this is what you will see:

You can start by looking up some keyword suggestions.

Let’s pretend I’m writing a post about blogging tips. On KWFinder, I can conduct one of two searches:

Suggestions Search: This will give you a list of long-tail keyword suggestions that are related to your search term.
Autocomplete Search: This will give you a list of the most popular searches that start with your search term.

For this example, I’m going to do a suggestions search. I type “blogging tips” into the search bar and this is the results page:

The left side shows you the keyword suggestions and the right side shows you the SERP results and the monthly search volume of each specific keyword. Since you’re just getting started with keywords, most of your focus should be spent analyzing the data on the left side.

So, let’s take a closer look at that:

Here, we can see a list of the actual keyword suggestions. And, there are also 5 different sorting categories for each keyword:

Trend. The search volume trend of each keyword over the last 12 months.
Search. The average monthly searches of each keyword over the last 12 months.
CPC. The average cost per click.
PPC. The level of competition in pay-per-click advertising.
DIFF. The actual keyword SEO difficulty.

Most of all, you want to focus on #2 and #5. You want to know the average monthly searches and the ranking difficulty of each keyword.

Ideally, you want to see an average monthly search volume of at least 50 and you want your keyword difficulty to be under 40. On KWFinder, keywords are ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 and anything under 40 is considered *somewhat* easy to rank for.

I like to click on DIFF and actually sort the keywords by their difficulty. That way, I can easily see which ones are easy to rank for. Finally, you’ll be left with something like this:

These are the long tail keywords related to my “blogging tips” search that have low competition.

So, I’m probably going to discount using “writing a blog for dummies” because it has a pretty low monthly search volume. But, “blogging for dummies” and “how to be a better blogger” are two fantastic options!

How to Use SERPChecker & SERPWatcher

Now, we’re getting onto some slightly more serious turf. And, I realize that the majority of you reading this article are probably just interested in using KWFinder, so I’ll keep this section brief.

SERPChecker can be accessed on the right side of the KWFinder search results. It allows you to easily see who else is ranking for your keywords and determine how you can out-rank them.

Once you write a blog post using the keywords found in KWFinder, you can track your ranking progress using SERPWatcher. It provides you with highly detailed statistics.

How to Use Keywords in Your Blog Posts

I wrote an in-depth explanation of this topic in my Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Basically, your main keyword should be included in a few different places:

Blog Post Title
Permalink or URL
Subheading – one is enough
Blog Post Text – ideally every 250 words or so

If you also want to rank for a secondary keyword, using it once or twice in your blog post should be enough. Ideally, use it in one of the other subheadings as well. After the blog post title itself, headings are the most important place to use your keywords! They basically tell search engines what your post is about.

But don’t go overboard with your keywords because there is such a thing as over-optimization or keyword stuffing! So, be careful using a plugin like Yoast. Oftentimes, it will encourage you to use your keyword more times than necessary. Personally, I use Yoast to monitor my readability – not my keywords.

How Long Does it Take to Rank for Keywords

A while.

On average, it can take anywhere from 4 to 6 months to get your blog post to start ranking highly in Google. It totally depends on the age of your site, your DA (what’s that?) score, and the keywords you’re using.

If patience isn’t your strong suit (hi, it’s me) then you can try to speed the process along by gaining some external links to your blog post. To learn more about increasing your DA score and link building, I highly recommend reading this post.

Did you learn how to rank your blog?

Keywords can seem complicated. But in reality, **it’s all about having a good strategy** (hopefully this article helped) and being organized.

Once you go through the process of finding and ranking for keywords a couple of times, it will become second nature - and the benefits will pay off big time. Being able to rank highly in search engines will bring more targeted traffic to your blog and allow you to spend less time promoting content on social media.

Although it’s not the only tool out there, KWFinder is really convenient for building an online following and getting your blog posts or website articles to rank highly on search engines.

Trust me when I say that I wouldn’t have gone through the effort of writing this entire post if I didn’t think this tool could totally change your blogging strategy. Sign up for the free trial of KWFinder here.

Keep reading more of my blog and website development tips and then let’s talk keywords in the comments. What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to this aspect of blogging?