Now that you have an understanding of how to show up in search results, its time to focus on which strategic keywords to target in the content of your website. Its also important to keep in mind how to make this content appealing to both users and search engines.
Keyword research allows you to better understand your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.
Keyword research provides you with specific search data that can help you answer questions like:
- What are people searching for?
- How many people are searching for it?
- In what format do they want that information?
This chapter provides you with tools and strategies for finding the right keywords as well as tips for preventing common mistakes people make when researching keywords. Additionally, you will learn how to create content that is optimized for these keywords. Once you understand how your target audience is searching for your content, you can develop a more effective SEO strategy!
Before keyword research, ask questions
In order to help a business expand through search engine optimization, it is necessary to first comprehend who they are, who their consumers are, and what their objectives are.
This is where corners are often cut. Many people forego this important step because it takes time to do keyword research, and they see no reason to spend the time when they already know what terms they want to rank for.
The difference between what you want to rank for, and what your audience actually wants, is often very large. When creating campaigns, it is more successful to focus on your audience and use keyword data to tailor the campaign, rather than choosing arbitrary keywords.
Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s is interested in improving their ranking in organic search results. If you want to help them, you need to understand their customers better. To do so, you might ask questions such as:
- What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?
- Who is searching for these terms?
- When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?
- Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
- How are people searching for ice cream?
- What words do they use?
- What questions do they ask?
- Are more searches performed on mobile devices?
- Why are people seeking ice cream?
- Are individuals looking for health-conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?
- Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?
What can you do to help provide the best content about ice cream and cultivate a community that meets people’s needs and expectations? It is important to ask yourself some questions before beginning your keyword research in order to have a better idea of what content to create.
What terms are people searching for?
What are the keywords and phrases that potential customers use when they are looking for what you offer? What is the keyword research process?
Discovering keywords
The keywords you have in mind are likely ones you would like to rank for. Your products, services, and other topics your website addresses are great seed keywords for your research, so start there! You can research similar keywords to the ones you have chosen by using a keyword research tool which will also tell you the average monthly search volume. Search volume can help you determine which variations of your keywords are most popular amongst searchers.
If you type in a few seed keywords into a keyword research tool, you’ll find other related keywords, questions people commonly ask, and topics for your content.
For our example, let’s say there’s a florist who specializes in weddings.
Typing “wedding” and “florist” into a keyword research tool, you may discover highly relevant, highly searched for related terms such as:
- Wedding bouquets
- Bridal flowers
- Wedding flower shop
The search volume for relevant keywords can vary greatly. It may be more advantageous to target terms with lower search volume because they are far less competitive.
Both high- and low-competition keywords can have advantages for your website. Learning more about search volume can help you prioritize keywords and choose the ones that will have the biggest strategic advantage for your website.
Diversify!
pages
do. With big brands, we often see the homepage ranking for many keywords, but for most websites this isn’t usually the case. Many websites receive more organic traffic to pages other than the homepage, which is why it’s so important to diversify your website’s pages by optimizing each for uniquely valuable keywords.
How often are those terms searched?
Uncovering search volume
The more people search for a given keyword, the more difficult it is to achieve a high ranking for that keyword. This is often referred to as keyword difficulty and occasionally incorporates SERP features; for example, if many SERP features (like featured snippets, knowledge graph, carousels, etc) are clogging up a keyword’s result page, difficulty will increase. If you are just starting to create a website, it can be difficult to rank high on search engines for certain keywords because bigger brands usually occupy the top 10 results. It can take a lot of time and effort to improve your ranking.
When a keyword is searched for a lot, it is harder to get your webpage to come up as the top result. If you set your price too low, you may not attract any shoppers to your site. It is often best to focus on specific, less competitive search terms. In SEO, we call those long-tail keywords.
Understanding the long tail
Although it may seem like ranking first for the keyword “shoes” would be ideal, it may not be as beneficial as one might think.
It’s great to have keywords that get 50,000 or even 5,000 searches a month, but most searches on the web are for words that are much less popular. If you target keywords with high search volumes, you could draw visitors to your site who have goals that don’t match the content on your page.
The majority of searches fall into the “chunky middle” and “long tail” categories.
Don’t underestimate these less popular keywords. Use of long tail keywords that have lower search volume often leads to a better conversion rate because the searchers are more specific and intentional in their searches. Whereas, a person searching for “best price on women’s running shoes” is probably ready to buy A person who searches for “shoes” is probably just looking around, while a person who searches for “best price on women’s running shoes” is likely ready to make a purchase. On the other hand, someone who is searching for “best price red womens size 7 running shoe” is practically ready to buy!
9 Great keyword marketing sources
Search Retargeting
Search retargeting companies have deals with various web entities to cookie users based on their search term. This is an exciting development in search, as it will allow for more personalized results. Data seems to be coming from secondary search engines, browser search toolbars, and even internal searches on websites. After you have set up your key terms, you can cooperate with search retargeting companies to display ads to users who have searched for your key terms on ad exchanges.
What can you say about this web behometh? The social network has a 16% market share of all online display ads and has a lot of data on their users, so there are many possibilities. This self-service platform allows marketers to target ads to users based on specific keywords that have been used in different sections of user profiles and behavior. The platform is designed to be similar to a search engine, with advertisers able to create campaigns, generate ads, and bid for their impressions. As Facebook’s popularity continues to grow, advertisers have an increasingly large opportunity to reach their target audience.
In-text advertising
Ever been reading an article or blog and see those double underlined or bolded words? When you move your cursor over them, you are served an ad. Companies such as Vibrant Media and Kontera team up with publishers to embed code that allows advertisers to buy links inside their content. Kontera markets this idea as ‘story-level marketing’, which is completely determined by the keywords used. The ad will appear in the text instead of next to the content.
Buy the page after a search click
A few years ago, our agency was working with an advertiser in the finance category and we were losing bids on some of our very important high-volume terms to an online financial publisher. I nstead of trying to compete with a company that has a lot of money, we looked at their website and arranged for our company to be the only advertiser on certain key pages where people were searching for specific terms. We purchased a sponsorship that included banners as well as being featured in some very noticeable editorial space. We couldn’t directly target users on the search engine results page, but we were able to reach users who searched for those terms and clicked. That’s a good demographic, and it worked well for us.
Internet Yellow Pages
IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have been a reliable source of advertising inventory for search marketers for many years. These websites have AdWords-like platforms which target search terms used on their platforms andLOAD ADS. The traffic mentioned isn’t only from search engines, but it does occur in real time when a user demonstrates an intention to find a relevant business.
Shopping Engines
Shopping engines that allow keyword targeting, such as Shopping.com and Bizrate.com, have been performing well for advertisers for years. The main benefit of being on social media platforms is that you are able to reach users who are potential customers. Shopping engines usually don’t have complex real-time bidding platforms, but they have enough technology to get the job done.
If Twitter improved their monetization, it would be a good platform for keyword marketers. This text is saying that the content is 100% word-based, meaning that it consists entirely of written words, and that it is delivered in short bursts that would be appropriate for placing ads between. Some startups have taken advantage of the opportunity to create Promoted tweets, which are similar to AdWords. Twitter is finally releasing this program to the public. The future seems promising for this channel.
Mobile Search
I keep hearing that mobile search is going to be very different from the fixed web search that we have been using for years. This is because engines are losing market share to specialty apps that are designed for specific purposes. A general engine like Google may not be the best option for searching for a local restaurant because you may not be able to get features like reviews, menus, and the ability to book tables. iPhone and Android restaurant apps may be a better option. Similarly, the mobile providers may have their own ideas about which search engine should be listed first on their handsets. I’m sure when Microsoft finally releases their iPad competing device, the Bing search engine will probably be the engine of choice.
Content and editorial links
Skimlinks is a new company that automatically turns product references in editorial and user-generated content into affiliate links. This could potentially be used as an in-text ad solution on an AdWords-type platform. You can attach your links to certain keywords inside your content. That sounds very promising!
Depending on what a user types into the search bar, Google will generate different types of results. If you want your website to appear for a specific keyword, look at the search engine results page to see what kind of content you need to create.
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