Keyword Research for Course Planning: Find Your Next Online Course Topic

Have you ever wondered, “What topic should I teach next?” If so, you’re not alone.

A course is one of a business’s most powerful tools to gain customers or clients. When creating a course, it can be hard to gather information to find the best topics that will sell.

The process of getting a course ready to sell isn’t an easy task. There are several key steps to the process, and planning your work is the most important part.

Keywords play a major role in determining which traffic sources will be driving sales directly to your course. Sales are why we care about keyword research. Using keyword research for course planning can also provide insights about specific topics trending on the web.

In this article, we will look at how you can do keyword research for course planning.

Table of Contents

How do you write good keyword research?

Identify target audience

The first step of keyword research for course planning is identifying your target audience. If you are not sure who your target audience is, you can use the following questions to help you:

What age group are they?
What gender do they fall into?
Where do they live?
What stage of life are they at? For example, are they a student or recently graduated from university? Are they young professionals or middle-aged professionals with families?

For example, suppose you’re offering a course on “how to paint a portrait.” You might want to find out what people are searching for when they want to learn how to paint a portrait.

Are they looking for information on brush strokes? Or color theory? Or different styles of painting?

By identifying these gaps, you can create a unique angle and fill a niche in the market that wasn’t there before.

Also read: Things to know before launching your first online course

Identify market gap

The second step in keyword research for course planning is understanding your market. In e-learning, that means identifying a need for a new course and finding ways to fill it.

You can do this by researching what other courses are available and how successful they are. You might also want to look at what content people access and share on social media.

In addition, you should identify gaps in the market where there’s no relevant content. If you’re an e-learning provider, you might find out what popular topics are on social media. However, you’ll find some topics that are not addressed in any existing courses.

For example, there might be less buzz about how millennials manage their finances. This could be worth creating a course around, considering it’s a hot topic these days.

Now you need to find out what they want. You need to understand:

What do they want to learn?
What are they already learning?
What are they struggling with?

Also read: How to identify a profitable niche for Online Business in 2022

Find competitor keywords

To write good keyword research, you need to understand your competitors’ keywords. If you know this, you can use it as a reference point for what keywords you should target and how.

Start the next step after determining your target audience and the keywords that best describe their search behavior.

It’s time to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for. There are a few ways to do this:

Use Google’s keyword planner

The Keyword Planner is a keyword research tool that gives you an idea of how many people are searching for certain terms. It can show you which terms have high competition (meaning they’re more expensive and difficult).

You can also use the tool’s suggested keyword list as inspiration for ideas for other related searches. You can use the keyword research tool free of cost.

Use Moz’s keyword difficulty tool or Ahrefs’ site explorer tool

Moz (formerly known as SEOmoz) has a free tool called Keyword Difficulty Tool. It helps you determine the difficulty of ranking any given keyword for a particular page on Google’s search results page (SERP).

It uses factors such as competition level, available links, and other parameters. You can use them to estimate the difficulty level of ranking for any given keyword phrase.

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool shows a lot of information about your competitors. It includes their organic and paid search performance, backlinks, keywords, and more.

After entering your competitor’s domain name in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool, you can see all the keywords they rank for. It also shows how many sites are referencing those pages. You can then determine which ones are relevant to your business. Then, start brainstorming content ideas based on these keywords.

Also read: How to do a content research

Use Google trends data to see industry trends

Google Trends is a great tool to understand the search intent of people. It shows you how popular a keyword or topic is over time, and it also shows you the geographical location of search interest.

For example, if you want to teach more about marketing, you could use Google Trends. It’ll help you find out that most searches related to marketing happening in the US, followed by Australia and New Zealand.

If you’re targeting an audience outside these countries (say, South Africa). Then, you would know that your keyword research has led you down the wrong path (unless your target audience includes South Africans).

Also read: Best profitable online course ideas & trends for 2022 with examples

Find keywords with good volume and low competition

The purpose of keyword research for course planning is to find good keywords.

It’s important to find keywords that have a lot of search volume but are also easy to rank. That’s because it’s better to rank in Google for a keyword that has 100 searches per month than 10,000 searches per month (assuming they have similar levels of competition).

This is because if you rank for a keyword that gets a lot of traffic but has high competition, it will be extremely difficult to get on top of the results page.

Good volume means enough people searching for the keyword (or its variations), so your blog post will rank well on Google. You can check this using Google’s Keyword Planner tool (you’ll need an Adwords account).

Low competition means not many other websites competing for the same keyword. This can be hard to judge, but here are some general rules:

If you’re looking at a generic term like “guitar lesson” or “how to play guitar chords.” Then it’s probably highly competitive and won’t get much traffic. Instead, you should look for more specific terms (e.g., “beginner acoustic guitar lessons”).

Note: Run all the keywords you’ve collected through Google Keyword Planner. Note down their suggested bids and search volume and competition. You should be able to use this information to decide which keywords you want to focus on ranking.

Also read: 6 online research tools every online learner should know about in 2022

Filter keywords

Now that we have a long list of keywords, we need to sort them out based on their popularity and relevance. To do this, you can use a few simple rules:

The monthly searches should be between 1000 and 10,000 (the more specific the niche, the fewer people search for it).

The keyword should be relevant to the subject matter of our course. (For example: “how to make a website” is not relevant for an online course about marketing).

Delete all the high competition keywords and focus only on the low and medium competition. In addition, make sure that you have keywords with good or high search volumes.

That’s where the keyword research for course planning concludes, and the course planning begins.

You can also leverage some keyword research courses free of cost to better grasp the idea and develop a course that shows and sells.

Create ideas for the course based on keywords

After you have selected the keywords for course creation, the last step is to create new ideas based on those keywords.

You can choose the same keywords as someone else. But your course is different from theirs. So, make sure you get the users to click on your course.

Here are some of the ideas if you’re creating a course around creating an e-commerce website:

How To Make An Ecommerce Website-Step By Step Guide

How To Make An eCommerce Website From Scratch

How To Make An Ecommerce Website That Will Sell Like Crazy!

How To Make An Ecommerce Website That Will Make You Money Fast

How To Make An Ecommerce Website And Get Viral Traffic

How To Make An Ecommerce Website And Get Traffic From Google

You can also add a description to each idea. It’ll help people understand what your course will be about before they buy it.

After you have created all of your ideas for your course, you can now start working on them.

That’s how you can leverage keyword research for course planning to launch your next course.

Also read: 10 unconventional online course ideas in high demand

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