One way to understand your audience is to use keyword research to discover the words your audience uses to understand your concepts.
Instead of reading a complicated manual with strange ideas, use familiar words and phrases that make sense to your audience. With keywords, you not only use the recognizable phrases your audience understands, but you also receive the added benefit of search traffic.
Over the years, most companies that wanted me to write content for them gave me some keywords they thought were essential to the topic.
Entire books have been written on search engine optimization and keyword research. Therefore, I want to connect this back to how to use keywords to improve your writing.
By using keyword research, you clarify your thinking. For example, if you write an article on cryptocurrency, you can use some of the top keywords on the topic.
Because it is a complicated topic, it is often difficult to understand as a beginner let alone a writer. Therefore, use the keywords to see your subject through your audience’s eyes.
My recommendation is you run keyword research after you finish the article, so the article flows for the audience and uses recognizable industry phrases. This idea is counter to most SEO mavens who use the keyword to create the content.
While you can do it, either way, writing the content and then adding keywords that fit into the topic produce better quality articles.
Final Thoughts on how to use keyword research
- Use Google Keyword Planner to research keywords. For a free program, it has many tools to help you identify the top keywords in your niche. If you want a paid option, check out SEMrush (affiliate).
- Identify the top 5-10 keywords for your niche
- As you compile your outline below, see how the keywords mesh with your article. They might give you guideposts for what to write, or they might lead you to content on Google similar to what you want to create.
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