As part of your digital marketing, it is important to have a keyword strategy in place. This is essential for establishing the foundation of your digital assets and communications plan as keywords have the potential to ensure the success of your digital presence and online campaigns.
Search Engine Results Pages AKA SERPs
To understand the value of your keyword profile, you only need to look at the Search Engine Results Page – and we mean page one. According to Backlinko, only 0.63% of Google searchers click on a website displayed on the second page.
So, building up your keyword profile for relevant search terms is vital. Once you have your list sorted you can optimise your strategy and website to reflect the keywords most important to you and include them throughout your website content to increase the position of your website in the SERPs and as a result, increase your website's organic traffic.
What are Keywords?
According to Moz, “keywords are ideas, topics and phrases that define what a piece of content is about…they’re also the words and phrases that end-users search in search engines [Google, Yahoo, Bing].”
Essentially, keywords are the phrases that are most important to your business. They’re the topics and questions you want your business to show up for in search results. These might include image, typed, or voice searches.
It’s also important to note the different types of keywords – specifically broad keywords versus long-tail keywords.
Broad keywords are short; usually made up by one to two words. They’re typically high in search volume, but also very competitive.
Long-tail keywords are phrases that contain three or more words and have a clearly defined intent. These styles of keywords allow us to capture a niche audience and generally have less competition compared to shorter keywords.
An example of a long-tail keyword is, developing a digital strategy and why digital strategy is important, whereas a short keyword is simply digital strategy.
Keyword Research
Before beginning your keyword research, outline your business’ services and offerings, then define where you wish to become industry experts. For example, RO Digital are experts in digital strategy, across social media marketing, programmatic marketing, search engine optimisation and more – so, naturally, these services highlight our starting point in defining our keyword profiles.
Once you have discovered where you want to position yourself digitally, use online tools such as SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Buzzsumo to research your keywords’ search volumes. Along with giving you a monthly search volume for the keywords, these tools will also highlight long-tail keywords you can incorporate into your content, as well as possible content topic ideas moving forward. This is important because you need to ensure your content takes the audience on a journey, meaning it offers them value before and after they have made their decision.
Along with using these tools, monitor the keywords and suggested questions that display throughout Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). By doing this, you will gain insights on what your target audience is searching for and get a clearer picture of the needs of your visitors and the language they use when making enquiries online.
Defining Your Keyword Profile
After researching the phrases and considering their search volumes, pick the keywords that have the most relevance to what you offer and what you want your business to focus on. We usually suggest focusing on a small list to begin with and growing your topics overtime.
Once you have outlined the keywords you will be working with, use them as the basis to optimise existing content on your website, create new content topics, and to support your digital marketing, including Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
To ensure you are producing content surrounding your most relevant and topical keywords, regularly review your keyword profile and research new opportunities to take advantage of.
Paid Media and Your Keyword Profile
The keywords you identify in the previous steps will underpin your organic SEO strategy, but they can also come into play in the paid search space.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes text-based advertisements that appear at the top of the SERPs – these are usually tagged as “Sponsored”. These ads are triggered and filtered by the keywords identified by the advertiser, or automatically if dynamic ads are in play. Either way, a strong performing ad solves the query coming via the search engines by the end-user.
Alongside supporting your paid search campaigns, your keyword profile can be a vital tool in setting up other paid media campaigns. Whether you use them to help guide your interest-based targeting on social media channels or to help build out page context audiences in programmatic advertising, your keyword profile really is the crux of all of your digital marketing efforts.
Conclusion
When executing your digital strategy, you need to research the appropriate keywords you wish to include within your website and content. By conducting this research, it allows you to develop knowledge on what your target audience is searching for online, the volume of your competition for particular searches, and content ideas and phrases to solve your audience’s search queries.
Both for your organic SEO and paid media, it’s important to recognise that your keyword profile is as much about your target audiences concerns, pain points, and questions as it is about your content and what your business is trying to achieve. So, it’s vital to reflect on the way in which customers use search engines – especially as we move further into voice-based searches and AI led research.
If you successfully perform your research and implement your findings within your digital strategy (including future content production), you dramatically increase your chances of being recognised by search engines and will be ranked organically higher. This then has the potential to increase your organic traffic and possible future leads – all for no extra cost. Remember, the higher you are ranked on search engines, the easier your current and future customers can find you.
By identifying your high-value keywords you can ensure all your digital assets are aligned in supporting your digital positioning