It can be hard to come up with topics for fresh blog posts! Paid keyword research tools are often used by bloggers to find ideas for posts. But are they worth the price tag?
Episode Highlights:
- Why (and How) People Pay for Keywords
- Pros and Cons of Paying for Keyword Opportunities
- What About the Cheap and Free Tools?
Resources Mentioned:
Episode 11 – Let’s Pay Less: Do I Need AI to Keep Up?
Episode 31 – Banking Content Ideas for the Whole Year
Bring Your Own Traffic Course – https://stephanieroyer.podia.com/bring-your-own-traffic
FREE Blog Post Idea Guide – https://stephanieroyer.podia.com/blog-post-ideas
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can help as many teacher business owners as possible:
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Check out my favorite places to look for fresh blog post ideas!
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Transcript
Stephanie 0:00
It can be hard to come up with topics for fresh blog posts. That's why paid keyword research tools are often used by bloggers to find ideas and inspiration for posts. But are they worth the price tag?
Stephanie 0:15
Hey there, teacher business owner. It's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.
Stephanie 0:27
Welcome back to the podcast. I can't believe it, but we have already made it to the last Saturday in January, and that means it's time for another installment of the Let's Pay Less series. If you're new, to pay less for traffic, we devote the final episode of the month to discussing popular budget busters in the online marketing world. The goal of this series isn't to tell you what to do one way or the other, because only you know the ins and outs of your business and your budget. Instead, we just weigh some of the pros and cons so that you can decide if it would be the best use of your marketing dollars.
Stephanie 1:06
In last week's episode, we touched briefly on the fact that coming up with a blog post idea doesn't necessarily mean that you're ready to write a blog post on that topic. It usually requires some keyword research in order to refine the topic and write a post that will satisfy user intent and get noticed on Google. This is where keyword research tools come in. These are tools that summarize keyword opportunities and share other information that can let you know if writing a blog post on that topic will be worth your time or not. There are many different tools on the market at a lot of different price points. So let's just talk about a couple of examples.
Stephanie 1:44
People who handle SEO professionally, they use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and these come with really hefty price tags. I mean, just their most basic packages come at like $129 per month, or $139 per month, respectively. And then there are kind of mid tier keyword research tools like key search or Uber Suggest. And those cost, again, like their basic package cost, you know, 24 to $29 per month and then go up from there. Then we have the low cost tools like Keywords Everywhere, or keyword surfer, and those can give you some of the information you need for keyword research, but just a very minimal cost, or even free. And then, just as a side note, a lot of these expensive tools also have either, you know, a free plugin or other free features that people can use, sometimes just with credits, other times, you know, they have some limited use tools that are available for free. So there are ways to do keyword research for free. And then some people talk about using premium chat GPT for keyword research, which I just would not suggest. I have an episode where we talk about the pros and cons of using AI for your business, and you can go back and listen to that if you'd like. But we just aren't going to touch on using AI for keyword research in this episode, because most people do not recommend it.
Stephanie 3:22
So many of the tools that I've mentioned already, especially the expensive ones, they come with a lot of different features to help with SEO. These tools are not just for identifying keyword opportunities. But for this episode, we're focusing on whether or not you need to pay for tools like these in order to build your bank of keyword ideas.
Stephanie 3:45
So let's look at some of the pros. Paid tools can give you more freedom in looking for keywords, because you don't have to worry about how many credits you have left. If you've done keyword research before you know that you often end up following a bit of a rabbit trail to find a strong keyword opportunity. This can quickly take up the free credits that you have available to you. So this is when a paid tool with unlimited searches can be helpful. Another positive is that you can validate possible blog post opportunities more quickly, because when you're browsing with a keyword research tool for your blog post ideas, you can see things like keyword difficulty and search volume right then, and that can help you decide if it's a blog post topic worth writing about. The final Pro is something I've already touched on, and that's the fact that paid SEO tools just are a wealth of information and data. If you really want to dive into using SEO for your business, you might enjoy having access to all of the features in these paid tools. For example, tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, they will track the keywords you're ranking for and let you see your performance over time. And this can be really helpful when you're making adjustments to your content and you want to see if those updates have made a difference in your rankings. But again, for this episode, we're focusing on whether these tools are necessary for keyword opportunities. You are trying to fill up your bank of blog post ideas, and you're wondering if you need a paid tool in order to do that. So even though the extra features can help you see a better return on your investment, are they necessary for coming up with blog post topics and keywords?
Stephanie 5:34
So with that in mind, let's move on to the cons. Obviously, the first con of paid SEO tools is the expense. If you're just getting started with your TPT store and blog, a monthly expense of even $29 a month is pretty hefty, let alone $129. The second con is that you can't, and really you shouldn't, just take a list of keywords from a paid tool and work your way down the list, writing a blog post for each keyword opportunity. It's important to use your own reasoning and eyeballs to determine if these keyword opportunities are right for your website, for your products, and for your audience. The third con is that these tools are only as good as your foundational SEO knowledge. You wouldn't give a kindergartner a calculator and invite them to solve a page of addition problems - first they need to learn how to add. And the same is true for keyword tools. If you aren't quite sure what you're looking at, those keyword opportunities aren't going to be as helpful for you, and they aren't really worth the price tag.
Stephanie 6:41
Now you might be wondering why I didn't talk very much about the cheap and free tools. That's because I feel like they're in a category of their own. You're able to access many of the features of a keyword research tool for a minimal investment with these - usually they're plugins - my favorite one is just a Chrome plugin. And in my course, bring your own traffic, I walk you through the keyword research process using a tool that is essentially free. But that process still starts with a blog post topic bank that has been sourced from other places. I do not rely on the tool to give me the keyword ideas. Instead, I use places like Google Search Console, Pinterest, the TPT catalog, and get blog post ideas from there, and then I use the tools to validate those ideas. I feel like doing it this way ensures that you create blog content that is closely related to your products, and it will best serve your audience. Doing it this way can also save yourself some credits, because, again, the free and very inexpensive tools usually have some sort of credit system and bringing your idea with you to the tool, it can keep you from wandering aimlessly around the internet and using up all your credits, because it will just take a couple of searches to land on the perfect keyword when you kind of already have your topic in mind.
Stephanie 8:17
So to sum it up, I think that you can successfully find blog post ideas and keyword opportunities for your website without paying for expensive tools. There are many places where you can find blog post ideas for free, and then you can validate those topics with free or inexpensive keyword research tools. But on the other hand, if you want to really dive deeper into SEO for your business, you might find that those tools will serve your business beyond the hunt for keywords. In that case, the investment could be worth it. Again, you know your business best. If you'd like my list of favorite free places to find blog post ideas, be sure to download my free guide. You can find it at Stephanie royer.podia.com/blog post ideas. That's Stephanie Royer dot, P, O, D, I A.com and then there are dashes between the words, blog post ideas. I will also leave the link in the show notes.
Stephanie 9:20
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.