With a new year comes new opportunities to expand your reach in search engine results. One of the oldest games for online brands and blogs, keyword use and research are cornerstones to any successful SEO or marketing effort. As time progresses, once valuable keywords may become stagnant, too contested or otherwise irrelevant, while new options appear that can deliver astounding results.

Optimizing a blog’s keyword strategy in this day and age takes plenty of work and dedication, but putting together a game plan only requires a few simple considerations. Today, we’ll examine how you can do just that and ensure your blog’s approach to keywords is relevant in 2021 and beyond.

What Is Your Blog Attempting to Accomplish?

Before you can adequately devise a keyword strategy for your blog, you must first assess the intent of both your blog’s purpose and that of your readers. What are you attempting to convey or assist with in each post? What challenges or needs do your users have when seeking solutions? By pinging search engines with content that is optimized for intent, need and desire, your keyword strategy can be narrowed down to something that is far more effective and refined (rather than broad and shallow).

There are a plethora of resources that help bloggers identify intent for both themselves and their readers, making it possible for every niche to uncover exactly what makes their audience tick and fulfills the blogger’s own publishing desires. From there, you can assess more technical concerns such as search volume and competition.

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Long gone are the days where you could easily rank for short, precise keywords and phrases. While these targets may become more obtainable as your blog grows and dominates other competitors, most bloggers will find themselves needing to be very precise with their keyword strategies. As such, analyzing the best long-tail keyword options is crucial to short-term success.

Long-tail keywords also provide a greater opportunity to rank in results that are truly relevant to the audience seeking answers, solutions or help in general. Even if it is possible to rank for a three-word phrase, is that the best arena for your content to be featured? If not, a longer SERP(s) should be targeted to ensure that your content is actually ranking for the most relevant options possible.

Strategize Content Deployment Around Keywords

Any blog absolutely should take the time and effort to formulate some semblance of a content calendar. Content calendars help ensure that blogs are pinging search engines with new content at just the right times to optimize rankings for select keywords. Whether it be seasonal or holiday-based, or simply based on late-breaking news, these plans can maximize how effective your content is at reaching audiences when and where it has the greatest chance of success.

Content calendars can also be highly useful in ensuring you are touching all relevant targets on a recurring basis: after all, if you just write about whatever whenever, you’re likely going to miss a number of opportunities to rank for select keywords!

Planning for your blog’s content strategy this year and beyond isn’t inherently difficult: develop a schedule to ensure timely content creation, target less-contested long-tail keywords that are relevant to audiences, and ensure your content is relevant as well to those in your natural audience.