Stop Choosing Keywords the Wrong Way (do this exercise instead!)

Back in the day when I first started blogging (before I knew squat about SEO), I thought what a lot of online entrepreneurs think: that all I have to do to “SEO” my post is get all the green lights in Yoast!

Easy peasy!

So I'd end up trying a few different phrases that summed up what my post was about, plugging each one into the “Focus Keyword” field in Yoast, and changing them out til I got the one with the most green lights. Then I'd make a few more tweaks to the post to get the last few green lights I'd missed, and called it golden.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Then I started learning about SEO, dove so deep into the rabbit hole that I became an SEO specialist without even realizing it, abandoned my travel blog and started helping other bloggers master SEO on their blogs instead.

Because I realized that they're doing exactly what I was doing:

Coming up with keywords from the wrong direction.

I've been writing a lot about SEO Robots and how they work.

In this post, I want to do a little exercise with some of your own content. Let's get our hands dirty in the SEO mud pit, shall we?

How to come up with keywords for your blog post (the right way)

 Think about one of your blog posts. It can be your most popular one, or the last one you published, it doesn’t matter.

If you were to jump in and try to optimize that post right now, what keyword would you target? (Or maybe, if you use WordPress and Yoast, what did you enter as the “Focus Keyword”?) 

Odds are your brain went through this line of thinking:

• Started with the blog post
• >> Thought “what’s the core topic of this post?”
• >> Came up with a phrase to best sum up the overall topic

Which makes sense. Your high school English teacher would be proud. You basically came up with a thesis statement in a single phrase instead of a sentence.

But unfortunately, thesis statement phrases don’t really help with SEO.

Try going in the other direction instead

Here’s my suggestion: try going in the other direction.

• Ask yourself “what’s the core information in this post (as opposed to the overall topic)? What questions or problems does this post solve?”
• >> brainstorm a list of 3-5 phrases that a real-live Human might type in a real-live search bar if they were looking for this type of information
• >> pick the most on-the-nose phrase

What did you come up with? Did they neatly sum up your whole post? Probably not.

But that’s totally fine!

Humans aren’t searching with thesis statements in Google. Humans are looking for answers to questions, solutions to problems, and information and guidance on things in their life. 

What are you searching on Google?

If you’re still stuck, try this exercise: 

Make a list of the last 10 things you typed into Google. (And I mean the exact phrases you typed, not just the vague type of thing you were looking for.)

Pro tip: Check your browser history and filter by “Google search” to just see Google stuff.

At the time of writing this post, my last 10 searches were:

• “How to find your google search history”
• “How to sell cosplay prints”
• “Pizza delivery near me”
• “Comic book fonts”
• “What is taffeta”
• “Elsa dress pattern adult”
• “What is keyword research”
• “Nintendo entertainment system release date”
• “Does fire 7 work with procreate”
• “Affordable ipad alternatives”

Your list is probably similar — maybe not in weirdness, but at least in variety.

As you can see, sometimes I searched

• straight-up questions (“how to sell cosplay prints”)
• sometimes for a particular piece of information (“nintendo entertainment system release date”)
• sometimes for broad terms to hone my understanding of something I was interested in (“comic book fonts”)
• sometimes for a specific product to buy (“elsa dress pattern adult”)

[If you can’t tell, I’m a huge nerd]

As a content creator, if I was writing an Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Pro Nerd (not that I’m planning to do that or anything….), my first thought for a keyword might be “professional nerd”, which might be a great “thesis statement phrase”, but is probably an awful SEO keyword for the type of content I'd want to write.

So instead, let's go in the other direction.

Doing this, I might come up with keyword ideas like:

• How to sell cosplay prints
• Starting a cosplay Patreon
• How to make money from cosplay
• Cosplay sponsorships
• Professional cosplaying
• Etc etc etc

A whole list of potential Robot/Human-friendly keywords to target with my awesome mega-nerdy content!

See? SEO isn’t necessarily as weird/complicated/magic-y/scary as you might have thought!

The next step would be researching these keywords to find and choose the strongest ones to focus my post on. That way, I could make sure from the start that I'm choosing a keyword that is actually being searched by the real-live Humans I want to get in front of.