Your keywords form the backbone of both your paid search AND your SEO campaigns. The search terms you target with ads and content determine who sees your ad.
Getting traffic to your website is easy, the hard part is getting the kind of traffic you want.
The difference between overpaying for a high volume of irrelevant leads and getting a direct channel of motivated potential customers is in the keywords that you target.
Today we are taking our previous episode – Audience Analysis – one step further and walking you through how to determine the KEYWORDS that will send you leads most likely to convert.
Once you have it, your KEYWORD MATRIX will be a resource you return to through every subsequent step of your marketing.
So what exactly is a “keyword”?
A Keyword just refers to a word or search term someone would enter into a search engine to get information.
What makes keywords so important to your marketing plan?
Keywords show you intent
Someone searching for “flash error code on Canon Rebel” is not looking to buy a camera.
Someone searching “Inexpensive DSLR camera” is more likely someone wanting to buy a camera.
Does that mean you should only target keywords with a buying intent?
Not necessarily.
Consider both keyword volume AND intent
Ideal Keywords = high intent long-tail keywords
What’s a high intent long-tail keyword?
It’s a more specific search.
Example: power window washing company in Irvine, CA
What is the benefit of focusing on a long-tail keyword over a broad search term like “power window washing?”
Broad search keywords give you high volume but intent is not specific enough
Your ad or content will show to people searching for:
- Tips for power washing their own windows
- Whether or not you should power wash windows
You’ll be paying for your ad to show (or paying in time and effort to produce content) for people that are not likely looking to engage with your offer.
And if people aren’t looking for what your page is selling, they’ll bounce leading Google to deem your page irrelevant to that search term
HOW do you find these magical perfect keywords to build your ad and SEO campaign around?
Most people THINK you just make a list of the keywords you GUESS your target audience is looking for.
Not so fast.
The most common keywords (“divorce lawyer in Reno”) will have huge competition.
So – expensive.
STEP ONE: IDENTIFY YOUR CUSTOMER
If you didn’t catch Episode 2
where we went over Audience Analysis & creating customer personas,
here’s a quick overview:
Consider your existing customer
Look at who engages with your brand on social
Too new? Look at your competitors
Create a detailed overview of your customers
You will have more than one
Create a customer persona:
- Gender
- Job
- Interests
- Hobbies
- What are their pain points?
- What are they looking for a solution for?
STEP TWO: FIND TOPICS YOUR CUSTOMERS CARE ABOUT
You don’t want to build a bunch of content around guesses
It wastes time & money
Using Reddit to drive content (or any forum site):
Reddit is an online forum
It can help you figure out the kinds of questions your customers search for
Example: your product is organic cat food
Enter organic cat food into Reddit and see the types of conversations that show up
Choose TOP to get the most popular conversation threads.
You’ll get things like:
“What’s the best tasting organic cat food for picky eaters?”
“Non-GMO organic cat food”
Enter a broad search term for your specific industry (camera, car window tinting, etc)
Now look for those threads with terms that are conversion-based
Example: limit your search to those with the term “Buying”
Use the topics that your customers are most engaged with to create a list of potential topics around which you can prepare content
Use KEYWORDDIT as a tool to generate a list of keywords related to a specific search query
Make sure you get at least FIVE content ideas or topics to be able to build out keyword search terms or content around popular search topics your customers are actually interested in
STEP THREE: IDENTIFY KEYWORDS FROM YOUR TOPICS
Use Google’s suggested search to identify popular queries around your search terms
Note the results
Start entering THOSE search terms in Google and see what it suggests
Keep going until you’re just seeing the same suggestions
NOTE: put a few spaces before your keyword – you may see totally different results
Also, use the related searches results
Other tools to find popular keywords in your niche:
Google Keyword Planner (you only have access to this if you have an AdWords account, but it’s free to make one)
So, now you have a huge list of keywords and search terms. What now?
Now you need to GROUP your keywords into THEMES and CONCEPTS
So bust out those Excel skills.
You’re looking to group keywords by recurring theme or concept
This is important for:
- Organized site architecture which is important because it makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index your site
- Easier to identify recurring/valuable keywords
We could go into a whole long thing about how to build your spreadsheet and organize your keywords
INSTEAD
You should go to our site
Follow the link to our “How to Create a Keyword Matrix” article
Well send you our Keyword Toolkit with all you need to create your keyword matrix
Once you have a snazzy spreadsheet with grouped keywords and search terms, what do you do?
Now its time to RANK those keywords by POTENTIAL
Find the gems in the pebbles?
Determine search volume for each of your keywords
Use tools like:
Enter your keyword and they’ll show you search volume (as well as cost per click which is important for determining if the term is highly competitive or relatively available)
That doesn’t give you the full picture though – it is data for the past month or year
Enter the term in Google Trends
This shows you if search volume is increasing, decreasing or howling steady
This is important because peoples search habits are always changing
Let’s get back to Cost Per Click
That is important for the next step: Commercial Intent.
Commercial intent relates to how much advertisers are willing to pay for their ad to appear for a given keyword search
Which tells you how much competition there’s likely to be for that term
How do you find that out?
Type the keyword into Google Keyword Planner
Click Get Ideas
Review the “Suggested bid” column
Or you can also get an idea by typing the term into Google and seeing how many ads show up
More ads = more expensive & harder to rank for in SEO
Your goal is to identify
High volume
High intent
Keywords with
Low competition
That’s like the holy grail.
But as you do your research you’ll graph your keywords on a 4 quadrant chart
As you chart your words on this graph, the best words available to you will become apparent.
And those BEST search terms form your Keyword Matrix