Your butt’s in your chair and your fingers are on the keyboard; the hardest part of writing a good post is behind you. Now all you have to do is settle on a keyword to push. Easy-peasy, right?
If you’re capable of writing interesting content, but not sure how to develop a list of keywords to fight for, the following 3-step guide will come in handy. This is the same keyword research preparation that Google partner companies use to inform their organic marketing strategies.
- Pinpoint your post’s purpose. It doesn’t matter whether you’re drafting a blog post, product description, or landing page: the first thing you should be doing is identify the post’s goals. You might want to attract new readers, win people over to your particular line of thinking, promote a new product or service, share some important news about your company, or answer a question that’s been posed. Whatever it is, make sure it’s concrete. The worst thing you can do for your efficiency and post engagement is to start keyword research before you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Before you move onto the next step, you should also try to think of metrics you can assign to this post’s goal. It could be engagements, raw traffic, comments, or links. Once you have a goal and target metric, you’re ready for step 2.
- Determine who you’re trying to reach. Once you’ve set your goal, you need to identify your target audience. Is your post going to attract new readers? Maybe it’s something only your loyal fans will appreciate? Or are you hoping to catch the eye of “influencers” who can broadcast your message to a larger audience, like when you’re gunning for a celebrity retweet? Your post might even be towards specific audience targets, like this one: today, I’m focusing on engaging blog writers who want to learn article optimization tips from Google partner companies, and the style and subject of my writing reflects that.
- Begin your keyword research. We know what our post is trying to accomplish, and we know who it’s trying to reach, which means we’re ready to start our keyword and market research. When you’re conducting this research, you want to pinpoint keywords that will yield high-volume traffic with lots of click-throughs, but won’t be too tough to crack. In other words, you want keywords that lots of people will use intuitively that aren’t too difficult to rank for. If you’re a real estate company writing a real estate blog, settling on “real estate” as your keyword phrase might seem like a good idea, when it’s actually one of the most competitive keywords to rank for in the industry. Your company now has to go head-to-head with real estate moguls dominating this simple keyword phrase. To make matters worse, this keyword isn’t even specific enough to get a click-through. Real estate what, exactly? You’d be much better off focusing on keywords that are less competitive, more descriptive, and give a reason to click-through. “Mortgage information” is a throwaway example of a keyword that’s more descriptive, more intuitive, and less competitive.
Keyword research is a big topic, but it’s one we love to discuss, so give us a call at (416)-619-7935, and let’s find what works for you.