Running an effective keyword campaign is key to tapping into the vast amounts of internet traffic coming from search engines, and that’s no secret. To put things into perspective, more than 93% of all web traffic comes from search engines. At the same time, 75% of all searchers don’t pass by the first page in search results.
Without a well-thought-out keyword strategy, businesses can spend a ton of money on content, paid advertisement, and SEO, yet without seeing any return on their investment.
On the other hand, a solid keyword strategy can be a major boost to any online marketing strategy. That’s how you get measurable results and a great ROI.
Here are the important keyword strategies that can take your online marketing to new heights.
Know Your Audience
For starters, you need to learn more about your targeted audience. Building customer personas should revolve around demographics, interests, education level, how they spend their time online and offline, goals, education level, interests, and so on. Most small businesses need to focus on anywhere from five to ten distinct personas. Content should be built with those personas in mind. The keyword strategy needs to be aligned with those customer personas as well.
By focusing on a specific persona you can use keywords relevant to them. For example, if you are a coding job placement service, then using a phrase like “find coding jobs” will be quite relevant to a “coding” persona. You can even further segment your audience into specific personas such as “coding jobs in Java.” That keyword is very relevant to particular persons who can code Java and are in pursuit of employment opportunities.
It is all about speaking directly to your target and earning a click that can profit your business.
Use Different Types of Keywords
SEO agencies such as this Denver marketing firm heavily rely upon the different types of keywords. Nowadays, all keywords are split into one of these three main categories:
- Short tail keywords
- Middle-tail keywords
- Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are the trickiest because they consist of four or more words. That makes it rather challenging to integrate them into the content. Typically, the search volume is quite modest, but they are greatly targeted and offer a much greater chance for conversion.
On the other hand, the spectre is short-tail and middle-tail keywords that are way less targeted, but they appeal to a greater group of people as the search volume is quite extensive. Plus, these keywords are easier to work with, and creating content around them is not that challenging.
Find the Right Keywords
The idea here is to get into the mind of your customer persona and figure out which words they use to find businesses such as yours. Keyword research tools such as Yoast Suggest Expander and the Google Keyword Planner are great and are a must-use. However, you need to go beyond and try to think of search intent.
For example, you are running a campaign for a plumbing company. The obvious selection of keywords would include:
- Nearest plumbing company
- Plumbing contractor
- Plumbing Company
- Plumber near me
These are good keywords that are often used by your customer persona. However, you need to think of related phrases as well. Phrases such as:
- Water disposal systems
- Gutter cleaning
- Leaky pipes
If you run out of ideas, you can make a Google query using one of your keywords, then scroll to the bottom of the page where you can find related searches. That can also offer a pretty good insight into how your targeted audience searches for services or products like the ones you offer.
Consistent use of Keywords Across All Digital Channels
Finding the best possible keywords is important, but it’s also super important how you use them. That means you need quality content. You need keyword-rich content that is easy to read and very compelling to the consumer. The keywords need to be used naturally throughout the content.
Nowadays, every respectable business with an online presence interested in making the most of their internet marketing efforts has a blog on their website. The blog is perfect for putting to work all your great keyword-rich content. Regular blogging is something that plays nicely with search engines. That will keep search engines coming back to your blog and consequently, your website will increase its ranking.
Keyword Placement
Blog posts are the obvious place where you need to place your keywords, but you don’t need to stop there. Plus, you shouldn’t just slap the keywords in the blog post’s body and stop there. Here is an example of where and how SEO professionals place keywords:
- The title
- Section headers
- Image names and photo captions
- Meta description
- In the first sentence and the last paragraph
Follow Trends and Current Interests
Google Trends is an excellent online tool that can help you learn what your consumer persona is searching for at the given moment, what draws their attention, and what they are discussing.
Based on that, you can easily draw some keywords and implement them in your content strategy. The idea is to join the conversation and ride the big wave as there is a lot to gain from it, mostly incredible amounts of web traffic. The biggest burden here isn’t about finding a trending topic or the keywords that surround it. But it’s for your copywriter to hit that sweet spot, and create quality content that will implement suitable keywords while also making sure that readers will be engaged.
Track Keyword Performance
You can’t expect great results unless you don’t track your keyword performance regularly. Every good marketer knows that tracking performance is the core of success. One needs to know what to measure and how to measure it.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are great online tools that can help you figure out the right audience, the keywords on your landing page performing well, the time visitors spend on your visitors, the keywords that perform poorly, and so on.
Then there is ProRankTracker and SerpBook which offer great insight into how your keywords perform and how visible your website is for specific keywords. Both of these tools feature a free version that everyone can use to fetch many helpful metrics. The best part of all about these tools is that you can track daily progress. That way, you can see clear directions and whether your efforts are getting traction or not.
Final Thoughts
A well-thought keyword campaign is the one thing in every online marketing strategy that can make the difference between amazing results and failure. Great online marketers always monitor which keywords work best and which ones don’t give results. This thing makes them so successful, while others do not so much.
By staying flexible and adapting as they go, they can make sure that they are always in line with customer intent. That’s the not-so-big secret to success and making the most of any keyword campaign. Stick to that and follow the steps that we’ve mentioned above. Success will soon follow.
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It seems to me that in the digital marketing world the whole game is about keywords.
Please teach us about long-tail keywords, short tail keywords and middle tail keywords