When you’re planning your SEO campaign, market research is crucial. One of the most important components of your market research will your keyword research, but this is an area where many franchise marketing companies can improve.
Most keyword research starts and ends with a cursory tooling with Google’s Keyword Planner, and that’s just not enough! You can increase your chances of success with the keywords you’ve chosen by making the effort to dig a little deeper during your initial research phase.
As one of the leading franchise marketing companies in Ontario, we are going to show you how!
One Step Beyond
Franchise marketing companies are going to need to start taking their keyword research one step beyond what they’re used to. The bar is raising.
You should start your keyword research by combing Google’s Keyword Planner for ideas. Look for those keywords that appear to be most relevant, and have a sizeable search volume. This is a good start, but it’s where most franchise marketing companies stop.
Rather than calling it quits here, try asking yourself the following questions to take your research to the next level.
- What is my audience’s intent, and how is Google answering their queries? Make sure that you check keyword intent. This can be done by performing a search of each phrase and taking note of the content that it turns up. Google pairs certain content to specific queries in an effort to match result to user intent, and you should be aware of this when formulating your own keyword strategy. To give you an example of this process in action, consider how Google generates content for electric guitar searches. Searches for specific products will yield a number of e-commerce sites, product reviews, and video reviews. In contrast, a more generalized search for “best electric guitar for beginner” will get you long-form articles with recommendations for novices. Informational queries about “how to string a guitar” or “how to tune to Drop D” will get you Google Quick Answers results and articles from industry authorities.
- How did these pages get links? Once you know what content is ranking, you can start to look at how they get links. Much can be learned from competitive metrics: Page Authority, Domain Authority, linking root domains, and the number of links will give you a good idea of what it takes to rank. Most franchise marketing companies could benefit from the Moz Chrome extension for these purposes. Try to identify patterns in how links are generated. Looking back at the electric guitar queries I provided earlier, I can see that a number of the links are left through comment spam. Others had links from blogs focusing on guitar instruction and reviews. If you find publishers linking to more than one competitor, target these for outreach.
The information provided here should give franchise marketing companies and business owners more than enough to enhance their keyword research strategy. Keyword research of this caliber will take longer, but it will definitely improve your results.