Some content marketers are guilty of shirking their responsibilities when it comes to proper keyword research and analysis. The guilty ones say they do it to achieve natural search engine rankings. Employ this careless approach to content marketing, and you’ll miss an opportunity for your business to grab it’s fair share of search engine traffic.
To start targeting keywords in your content marketing, follow the keyword selection tips provided below.
Make Use of Keyword Research Resources
Google’s Adword Tool is quite a popular resource when it comes to keyword research. Make good use of this free tool to get your research started. Paid tools like WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, and Market Samurai also provide some valuable insights that you probably won’t get on Google’s tool.
SEMrush can be used to identify keywords that you’ve overlooked on your post and pages, so it’s a valuable tool to use after you’ve posted content. In choosing your keywords you must consider search volume and competition.
Make It Relevant
Your chosen keywords must be relevant to your type of business. Make sure that you don’t choose broad terms that could be applied to any other business. For instance if you’re selling baby furniture, you’ll want to narrow your keywords down to baby furniture, high chairs, cribs, etc rather than say furniture for the home.
Paid Search Plus SEO Equals More Traffic
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because you’re using paid search you don’t have to use SEO to rank for those keywords. Use content marketing and other SEO strategies to rank those keywords for which you’re buying ads.
Check Your Rank
When you begin writing to improve your rank on certain keywords, check your rank. Web CEO, SEOmoz are great tools that will help you find where you are in the results. Track your progress as you continue to publish more content, so you’ll know if you’re getting real results or publishing in vain.
Incorporate The Keywords Into Your Content
If there’s no easy way to incorporate your keywords or key phrases into your content, then you’re wasting your time. You’re probably targeting the wrong keywords to begin with. Go back to the research phase and target keywords that you can write around.
Remember that you need to be mindful of your keyword density. You can risk severe Google penalties if you use the keywords in an unnatural way within the content.
Think Traffic
Analyze closely your site’s traffic. What keywords are being used by visitors to arrive on your website? Make a list of all the popular keywords and target similar keywords in new content to boost your traffic. Alter the phrases in different ways, keeping it as natural as possible.
The Keyword Should Convert
Thousands of hits every day is pointless if the traffic doesn’t convert. Why would you target keywords like “free accounting software” if you’re trying to sell your software. Visitors will leave your site when they see that you’re selling your software instead of giving it away. Use tools to dig deeper into your analytics to see what insights you can get to improve your conversions.
The bottom line is that you should not play hit or miss with your content marketing strategy. You’re investing your time, effort and money to create good content, so you need to start targeting something or you’ll end up with nothing.
