Relevance should be the ultimate goal of your keyword strategy, not conversions. If your content is perfectly tailored to what your business has to offer, the conversions WILL follow. The reverse is not always true. That’s why it’s important to choose keywords that best represent you as a business. There are a million ways to generate more organic traffic but only a few to generate the right traffic. The experts at Vissina will show you what to look for when building your keyword strategy.
What is Keyword Strategy?
Put simply, a keyword strategy is how you want to target the keywords you’ve found to be the most critical to your website. A few for us are: “Digital Marketing Agency” “Scottsdale, Arizona” “Digital Marketing” “SEO Marketing” . . . and all the other core services we offer. We have quite a few and we use them whenever the opportunity is given.
The best way to start is by looking at yourself, your product/service, and your competition.
Your Business
Start by assessing what your goals are. Are you trying to get more clients for your marketing agency? Do you need more conversions for your online jewelry store? What is the end goal of your business? When you know that, then you need to come up with a list of reasons why you’re different from the thousands of other sites people can visit. The more insight you have on your end user’s intent, the more power you have to improve in those areas.
Search Intent
Now comes a look at your audience; why are people coming to you? Do people come to your website looking for information, to buy, or sell something? You need to figure out how well you know your audience and how best to target them.
The Words
Words are king when it comes to content, but they need to be relevant to the user.
For example, let’s say you have an auto repair shop. You posted a blog “How to Replace Your Head Lights.” After a few weeks, you see you get a lot of traffic from your new blog but it has a level of high bounce. The issue is that your blog doesn’t show them how to replace their headlights but merely pushes them into your shop so you can do it for them. Even if it’s a complimentary service, the user intent is completely different and your site will suffer for it.
With user intent, you walk a fine line. Yes, you can get a lot of traffic for terms that are seemingly related, but these are cosmetic relations to the user.
Your Competition
This is actually one of the first things I do after I figure out what keywords to go after. It’s pretty simple, you just type the keyword into google (preferably in an incognito tab) and see who ranks #1 organically. Dive deep into the top five search results and see if they have any common threads and what you can do to replicate and surpass their success. It’s actually pretty easy to improve the keyword strategy of someone who is already #1. Look at the language of their content, how they engage with their audience.
Analyze Data
At the end of the day, you’re going to go through some trial and error to figure out what works best. The strategies given above help you to build the initial pathway to your keyword strategy, but the real success comes from analyzing the data over time and making improvements based on what you see.
In the auto repair example given above, I’ve given you a scenario in which you have a piece of content that is actually doing your website harm in the long run for pretty obvious reasons. Analyzing the data is the only way to prove that you need to rethink your strategy. In that example, I would either create a video or article that shows the customer how to replace headlights themselves or delete it entirely. You can also give them the tutorial and at the end of your article, say that you offer free headlight replacement with the purchase of an oil change.
In this way, you’re using data trends to get a better insight into what your customers want.
Checking Your Data
Checking your Google Analytics regularly is probably the best way to keep track of your SEO performance.
Landing Pages
Landing pages give you the power to go after very specific keywords. For the structure of our auto repair shop, the keyword of the homepage might be “auto repair shop (location).” However, you can create landing pages deeper into your site’s structure to target specific services you want to rank for. A page for “Oil Change” would be perfect for repeat business. You could even use search ads and direct your traffic to that landing page, in fact, that’s the purpose of a landing page.
This way, from start to finish the user’s intent is always there.
Stay Up-to-Date
The most important thing is to stay on top of your keyword strategy. You might get to the top of search but you won’t stay there for long if you don’t continue to analyze SEO performance and improve your content to fit the needs of your user.
