How to Create a Keyword Library

It’s day seven of the free travel blogging course based on my 2021 E-book entitled 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career. This episode shares tips to create a keyword library. Follow this series to create the habits to be a successful travel writer or blogger!

About Break Into Travel Writing: Learn everything you need to launch your travel writing career at BreakIntoTravelWriting.com; a podcast and website designed to help you build a travel blog your readers love as well as help you achieve your goals as a travel writer or blogger.

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Make sure to listen to the full podcast, so you can hear all the ways to research keywords and create a keyword library that will help you rank for words quickly and build traffic fast.

30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career E-book Day 7

Today’s lesson is all about How to Create a Keyword Library. This series is here to help you launch a successful travel blogging career and create the habits to be a successful travel writer or blogger.

Download the FREE PDF worksheet for day 7 before you read on!

This series is here to help you launch a successful travel blogging career and create the habits to be a successful travel writer or blogger.

If you are stumbling upon this episode and want to start from the beginning of this series, please head to episode 161.

If you want the entire ebook so you can work through it from start to finish at your pace, it can be found at bitw/30daysebook or from the courses tab on the navigation bar of my website.

Today’s lesson is all about building a KW library for your website. For those of you listening who have already launched your website, today’s lesson is super relevant. If you didn’t create a KW library when you started your site, or you did, but haven’t reviewed the KWs in months or years, it’s time to take a look at your site’s main KWs, so keep listening because keywords can drive a tiny bit of traffic, a medium amount of traffic or tons of traffic!

So, let’s jump into today’s lesson, which is all about Creating a Keyword Library for your website.

Just to clarify, the main Keyword Library for your site is different from the specific keywords you’ll go after for each blog post.

The main KW library should reflect your blog’s main niche and topic and these are words you’ll strive to rank for both traffic and so Goole and other search engines understand what your site is about. Anything searched on a search engine, whether a single word or a phrase, is considered a keyword. This is how Google will find your content and in turn, how readers will find your website and articles.

A keyword library should be a list of words that reflect the main themes of your niche and planned website content. Without a keyword library, you are writing without a plan.

When creating your Keyword library, you’ll want to come up with a combination of one word, two word, and long tail (many word) options. These will be words that you will incorporate into your website pages and posts.

Find your main keywords and then more that are synonyms.

The main reason to use synonyms and related keywords in your text is that they will make your text much easier to read. If you write about ‘luxury travel’ and use the words ‘luxury travel’ in every other sentence, your text will not flow naturally and become unreadable. Google will also consider it keyword stuffing which is using one word or phrase too many times.

Not all keywords are created equal. Some words will be VERY HARD to rank for in Google such as “travel”, or “paris” or “hotels in paris”. Other long-tail keywords can be much easier to rank for such as “hotels in paris with a pool”.

Bottom line: Going after keywords with the highest search volume isn’t the best strategy (because these words are hard to rank for). This is where having a focused niche will help you!

Here are a few Keyword Examples

Adventure Travel Keywords

Let’s say your site is about Adventure Travel and you try to target “adventure travel” as a main keyword. It’s got a monthly search volume of 14,800, but the top competitors for that keyword according to Keysearch are many adventure tour companies like G Adventures, and big sites like TripSavvy and Travel & Leisure.

Luxury Travel Keywords

Luxury travel 18100 but a very high difficulty for ranking.

One of the top websites that rank for this term is theluxurytravelexpert.com and you can see it uses the word luxury 26 times on the homepage between tabs, sections, article titles, and other text.

Jetsetter.com is also a top-ranking website for the term luxury travel. It uses the word luxury 29 times on the homepage between tabs, sections, article titles and other text plus text that say:

We’re Jetsetters, and we’re not ashamed to admit we love a little luxury, whether it comes to the hotel, restaurant, cocktail lounge or airline. If you’re into luxury travel, too, (and you probably are!), we’ve got plenty to inspire your next over-the-top trip.

This is where I strongly suggest checking out The Importance of Choosing a Travel Blog Niche, a Guest Post from Victoria Philpott from Day Out in England & VickyFlipFlopTravels.

Another resource is day 2 of this series (Episode 163) which is Defining Your Travel Website Niche and focuses on the benefits of creating a niche travel website instead of a broad travel site.

Niching Down with Keywords

If you start your site with more of a focus such as luxury travel in a certain state, province, or even continent it is more niched.

Or let’s say you focus on adventure travel. You can either niche down by location. Or niche by topic. You could focus only on kayak, hiking and biking travel adventures to start.

And remember once your site is established and ranking well, you can always expand your destinations.

Once you dive into looking for KW’s you’ll see that the best hiking trails in a particular city or even state will usually be much easier to rank for than more random adventures around the world.

Then keep diving deep on your keywords and using hiking as an example, there are dog-friendly trails, family-friendly trails, kid-friendly hikes, extreme hikes, hikes to waterfalls, easy hikes, hard hikes, long hikes, and it goes on and on.

So, knowing what your site is about and creating a master keyword library that focuses on your main niche topics and locations and using these KWs on the homepage, in your articles, as titles for articles. In meta descriptions for articles, on your about page, contact page, etc will help you focus on what to focus on and let Google and other search engines know what your focus is and allow anyone visiting your site to understand what your site is about.

My favorite keyword tool is Keysearch. It’s just $17 a month and offers lots of great reports and features. I am an affiliate, which means you can get an extra 20% off using the code KSDISC when you sign up.

With Keysearch, you can also find the keywords your competitors rank for (cool, huh!)

You can also use Google as a free research tool. Type in a keyword/s and scroll to the bottom for ‘related searches’. UberSuggest is another tool that has some free tools and some paid.

A Great Resource for today’s show is to know the keywords you are ranking for. You can find this with tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Keysearch, UberSuggest and of course Google Search Console.

I have a post sharing how to actually find your KW’s called Google Ranking: How to Find the Keywords You Rank For.

Have you downloaded the FREE PDF worksheet for day 7?

I hope you enjoyed this show and day 6 of 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career series.

About The 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging Series

This is part of a podcast series that airs on the first Wednesday of each month, where I share tips from my newly revised (for 2021) Ebook entitled 30 Days to Launch a Travel Blogging or Writing Career.

The 30-day foundation course lays the groundwork needed to launch a travel blogging or travel writing career from the launch of your website to landing media trips or creating your own paid-for solo travel!

Each of the tips from the Ebook, are short and come with a worksheet. In fact, make sure to click here for the pdf worksheet from today’s lesson.

Day 1: Knowing Your Why and Your Goal
Listen to the Podcast | Day 1 Blog Post
Homework Day 1: Download the PDF!

Day 2: Defining Your Travel Website Niche
Listen to the Podcast | Day 2 Blog Post
Homework Day 2: Download the PDF!

Day 3: Define & Find Your Competitors
Listen to the Podcast | Day 3 Blog Post
Homework Day 3: Download the PDF!

Day 4: Find Your Ideal Reader and Audience
Listen to the Podcast | Day 4 Blog Post
Homework Day 4: Download the PDF!

Day 5: 5 Ways to Brainstorm 50 Blog Post Ideas
Listen to the Podcast | Day 5 Blog Post
Homework Day 5: Download the PDF!

Day 6: How to Choose a Blog Names & Tag Lines
Listen to the Podcast | Day 5 Blog Post
Homework Day 5: Download the PDF!

Get All 30 Days Now! Purchase the Ebook for only $49

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