Using Blog Posts for Keyword Research

Blogs are great for many things; from getting quick feedback on an idea (if you've allowed comments) through to testing out new ideas and marketing formulae (if you're testing and tracking the keywords properly).

However, many people forget that they are also great for keyword research. In particular, they work well for researching long tail keywords, as well as keyword phrase variants. 


A word of warning – they're not much good for one or two word primary keyword phrases; use traditional methods, as well as commercial products such as Market Samurai or WordTracker for these.

Easy Keyword Research with Blogger.com

Perhaps the largest of all blog sites is Google's Blogger. You're reading a blog hosted by Blogger, and one of the principal advantages from many users perspective is the relatively tight integration with Google's tools, such as Google Documents.

One other aspect that's attractive, and which prompted this article, are the statistics that can be tracked.

For example, Blogger tracks the location of people visiting your blog. There are also the usual page view statistics, as well as one very interesting piece of data – the keyword phrases people used to find your blog.

Here's how it works: 

• someone types a keyword phrase into Google;
• Google fetches the pages from its database and displays the result list (SERPs);
• the user clicks a URL;
• Google redirects the user's browser to the target page.

Now, once this redirection has taken place, the session variable known as the HTTP Referrer contains the original Google search URL (the one you can see in the browser status area, if you hover over the link text.)

Blogger can then access this data, and extract the exact keyword phrase that the user originally typed in before choosing your page from the SERPs.

How does this help?

Well, if even if your page appeared well down in the list for one or two keywords, there's at least half a chance that other keywords in the query are related to content that you could provide. 

So, at worst they'll be good prompts for future blog entries.

The place to look for these gems is in the Traffic Sources menu item, accessible from the Overview page of the blog in question (Overview->Stats->Traffic Sources).
At best, these keyword phrases can offer useful insights into what people are looking for, and what you should be targeting in order to make the most of the traffic on offer. And that's the key – traffic. 

But what happens if you've got a blog that doesn't get enough traffic for this analysis to be helpful?

The answer is simple - blog, promote and wait. Or, boost your profile by simultaneously publishing on other places like Squidoo and HubPages. Once Google notices your blog, and you've got a few posts under your belt, you'll be able to reap the keyword research rewards!