Know Your Audience
Keywords matter if you want to reach real customers.
When starting a keyword research project, the first thing you need to do is figure out customer intent. What does your customer want? Are they trying to solve a problem, answer a question, or trying to figure out a How-To? Figuring our customer's intent will help you write the content that your customers are looking for. Then, when you answer the customer's questions or solve their problem with well-written content, the search engines will see the content and send the customer to your website. Without knowing customer intent, you have nothing.
Create a Buyer Persona
A buyer persona will help you figure out your customer's intent. A buyer persona is a research A buyer persona will help you figure out your customer's intent. A buyer persona is a research involving your current and future customers. Usually, based on a fictitious character, the in-depth study pulls together information that will include: demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. These characteristics will determine how your future buyer will conduct themselves when looking for products and services. The buyer persona will answer the what, why, and how about your customers. With this information, you can produce the content they are looking for in a format they like.
Customer intent and buyer persona are essential, so don't skip. Some people specialize in doing these two things.
The buyer persona will be a tool you will refer to many times and will continue to update. So make sure to get started on buyer personas.
The next thing you will need to do is make a master list of keywords. This list will be the underlying foundation for all your search engine optimization (SEO) on your website, blog post, social media, and anywhere you would use words to talk about your business. Each web page will have its own set of keywords.
Getting Started on Keyword Research:
1.) Organize your business products and services into relevant lists. You might want to start with the categories in your website navigation menu.
2.) Under each category, make a list of seed keywords. What do you think the keywords might be.
3.) Make a list of competitors, company names, and web addresses. Looks at their pages to see what words they are using.
4.) Refer to your buyer persona. You need to understand who your customer is and their habits, where they live, and where they are in the buyers' cycle, to have a well thought out marketing plan. The keywords you use should also be the keywords your customers are using.
5.) Your customers are doing a web search to answer a question or solve a problem they are having. Your content should address your customer's issues.
At this point, you are now ready to start a keyword search.
Using a keyword program to look for suggestions can be fun and informative.
Simple Keyword Research
When searchers, future customers, put a query into a search engine, they use keyword phrases. A phrase is 2 to 5 words or long-tail keywords. These words will describe what this person wants to find.
As a marketer, you are trying to find your customers' keywords to search for your products and services.
There are many ways to do keyword research, and guessing should not be one of them.
1. Seed Keywords
Seed words are your starting point. Seed keywords could be the subjects in your website menu, words you know people are using, and even industry jargon. Industry jargon most likely will not be the keywords your customers use. Doing the research will point you in the right direction.
Write down or start a spreadsheet. I use Google Docs for this demonstration.
Main Website Idea:
Bunnies as pets.
Seed Keywords:
Bunnies
Rabbits
Rabbit Care
Rabbit Behavior
Rabbit Health
Picking out a Bunny
After each seed keyword, make an empty column.
2. Finding More Keyword Options
Open a keyword research program. For this demonstration, I use UberSuggest for this example.
In your keyword research program, type in one of your keywords to see other keyword options.
3. Add the Volume Amount to your Spreadsheet
Next, add these options to your spreadsheet. Then, in the column next to the word, add the Volume number.
Do this research for each seed keyword.
If you would like more options, click that button, and hundreds will be available.
After you start to fill out this spreadsheet, you will have an excellent idea of the keywords used by searchers in search engines. The numbers will guide you to the words people are using.
For example, Rabbits at 450,000 are used more often than bunnies at 165,000. However, you may decide to use both in your content because they both have high scores.
Be careful with these research numbers and words. The words you intend to incorporate into your content may represent a different subject. For example, bunnies may be associated with a magazine published each month for adults to view. Use the word in a phrase will help eliminate this mistaken identity.
Over time the numbers may change, meaning you may want to update this research in maybe six months to a year.
You will be conducting this type of research for each webpage on your website.
The above is just a starter keyword research project. There are many resources and tactics professional SEO’s use to get to the best keywords for your website. But, this basic information will get you started in the right direction.
Happy Keyword Hunting!
More Keyword Research Programs.
Ubersuggest
Moz Keyword Explorer
ahrefs Keyword Explorer
