Keywords are the Foundation of any online marketing effort
Keywords are the cat’s pajamas of online searching.”
Small businesses often face significant challenges when conducting keyword research, particularly due to the complexity of identifying the right keywords. Trends and markets change and one keyword that you think might be profitable could actually be a massive waste of time. Making effective and proper Keyword Research a must before starting any online marketing effort, from building out a new website, to Search and Paid Ad Marketing.
Getting Keyword Research Right
Constant Algorithm and trend changes make identifying relevant Keywords all the more important. But Small Businesses can struggle to know where to start without proper guidance.
It is important to identify the most relevant Keywords for your business or website, and when just starting out or trying to run a business you may not have the time to learn everything there is to know and act on those best practices on your own.
For just about every Keyword, Small Businesses compete with larger, more established companies, making it hard to rank for high-competition keywords without expert SEO strategies and execution.
Even if you do conduct your own Keyword Research, it’s easy to come away with literally hundreds of possibilities, how do you know if those difficult keywords are worth targeting?
To make things even more complicated, you can break Keywords down into two categories, “Head” and “Long Tail”
Head keywords are short and often generic, they can be just one to two words. While Long Tail keywords are much longer, sometimes being twelve or more words in length. The benefit of these is that they are hyper specific, sometimes even explaining exactly what the searcher is looking for.
These longtail keywords are where most of your efforts should be targeted and will most likely see the greatest returns. When you target long tail keywords you can see the best results in conversions, traffic, and face the least competition.
The Benefits of Proper Keyword Research
With properly conducted Keyword Research, however, you can gain valuable marketing trend insights that help you focus your content on relevant topics that your audience is searching for.
This lets you grow your traffic; by targeting the right keywords, small businesses can improve their search engine rankings, leading to increased website traffic and increased traffic leads to more customer acquisition.
Furthermore, creating content around popular keywords allows businesses to attract and engage potential customers, guiding them through the buyer’s journey from initial awareness of your brand to final purchase.
There are dozens of tools that help with this process, but one thing to keep in mind when using these tools is that this is what everyone else is doing. Don’t be afraid to use your own intuition to find keywords that represent an angle that your competition is not exploiting.
As effective Keyword Research is done, you’ll also gain an understanding of Search Intent. Researching keywords helps businesses understand the intent behind search queries, from question and research Keywords to buying Keywords. This allows businesses to create content that meets their audience’s needs at every step in the buying process and ranks well on search engines.
It’s not just website content that Keyword Research informs. Everything from website linking structure to Social Media content development can be informed by in depth and through Keyword Research.
So, What’s The Process for Conducting Keyword Research
When Heartless Bastard Digital Strategies is conducting Keyword Research we dive deep into the best keywords to utilize for your campaign, informing every next step along with our comprehensive audits. The following is a brief outline of how we do this and incudes some of the tools that we use along with our own, in house methods for narrowing down Keywords to target.
• List Relevant Topics
By starting with broad topics related to the business and identify specific keywords within those topics. Looking for Keywords that fall into different places on the buying journey and are most relevant to your goals.
• Analyze Search Volume and Difficulty
Using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to determine the popularity and ranking difficulty of potential keywords to focus on those with high search volume and manageable competition. Meanwhile we take note of those keywords that are competitive and discover why. Despite the “difficulty” focusing on ranking for them may be worth the uphill climb. Furthermore, we take note of those keywords that match your goals. Even low volume Keywords may be worth ranking for, as they may signal that the searcher is ready to buy now.
• Assess Competitor Keywords
Examine which keywords competitors are ranking for to identify opportunities and gaps in the market. This gives us a better understanding of what the competition is doing. Not to “copy their homework” but do it better.
• Prioritize Keywords
Generally, we’ll focus on a mix of high-competition and low-competition keywords to balance short-term and long-term goals. However, each Campaign is unique, and must be customized to meet the individual goals and objectives of the Campaign. Nothing is one size fits all.
Killer Keyword Research from Heartless
Let us help you with your Keyword Research. We’ll sit down with you, outline your goals and objectives and help you to focus on the Keywords that actually matter for you, your business, and deliver you results.
Contact us today and get started building the foundation of your future.
