Christian Blogging Tips | How To Do Keyword Research

Ok in yesterdays post on How to Promote your Christian blog, I left you guys with checking out the keyword tool that Google provides. I hope you all played with it a little bit and found a few key words that look interesting to you. I hope you didn’t run right out and post a new blog post based on just that little bit of research. You have 2 other factors to consider before you choose which keywords you are going to target. So let me go over all 3 factors you need to consider.

1. Is there demand for what I want to talk about? Using the google keyword tool you can find out how many people per month search for your certain subject. You can also get ideas from the results that it brings back for new blog posts. The first time I used a keyword tool I found the keywords “Bible verses about Strength”. That page today brings me almost 600 visitors a day but there has been a lot more to getting to page 1 of google than just choosing a keyword. More on that later.
2. Second you need to check and see how much competition there is for your keyword you are interested in. Especially in our Christian blogs, many Christian catch phrases and idioms have very little demand and a lot of competition. I have had more than one idea that I have looked at the competition and said it wasn’t worth it. Phrases with 1500 searches per month and 15 million webpages that talked about that phrase. The idea is here is to find words and phrases that have less than 100,000 pages that use these terms. Some say to go lower than that, down to 30,000 but I have found that most Christian websites and bloggers do not know how to promote their pages so 100,000 is a good number to shoot for because you can compete even if you have a new blog.
3. Third you need to scope out the competition. You need to look at the first page of google and see who is in the top 10. This is where having another tool comes in real handy. You can get free tools to evaluate the competition from SeoQuake that will help you figure out how many backlinks the page has and their page rank ect. or you can bite the bullet and buy the software program I use called Market Samurai (affiliate link). It offers a free trial. I liked this software so much I bought it and I don’t have money to blow on every gimmick out there.

Finally if you are really serious about learning how to get people to your website I have a suggestion for you. There is a website called The Challenge that is geared towards teaching people how to start from scratch and within 30 days make at least $1.00 from some type of advertising or affiliate sales. Now I know some of you might not like the idea of learning from people who are only into making a buck from their websites but the information that you glean from them will absolutely help you learn now to get people to your blog even if you have no desire to make money from it. Remember for those of us that think of this as a part of ministry, it does no good to have the greatest content in the world and have nobody read it. Besides in all honesty, most of the ways they show on how to make money from your blog just doesn’t work as well with a Christian blog. I will go over in more detail later on how you can make some money with your Christian blog if you so desire.

In the next post I will share with you what backlinks are and how important they are to get on the first page of google.

So today I encourage you to go and get the free trial of Market Samurai and check out the website called the Challenge.

Blessings

Pastor Duke

Author’s note. Since writing this post market samurai has gone downhill in all that it provides. You can learn to get the information you want with the Google keyword research tool. Google has improved their tool.