Effective Keyword Research Strategies for Content Marketing

Introduction to Keyword Research

Keyword research is critical to online content creation because finding potential customers’ search intent will unlock a list of potential keywords. The essence of keyword research is to discover high-performing keywords or phrases your target audience uses to find information online. By understanding your potential clients’ search intent, you can create valuable content that meets their needs and expectations.

Keyword research is an exploration of the language of your users to find the right people’s search intent in the form of search terms that will lead them to your content. As we go deeper into this exploration we will uncover tools, techniques, and nuances that transform a random collection of keyword phrases into a content marketing strategy that elevates your content marketing efforts.

The Importance of Keyword Research in Content Marketing

The importance of keyword research in content marketing cannot be overstated because all related queries are a starting point for site ranks and website traffic. The objective of keyword research is to build higher-ranking web pages in search engine results pages, attract much traffic, and promote conversion.

Search Engine Visibility 

Targeting your audience with the right keywords promotes visibility in search results. It enables search engines like Google to understand your pages and content. This improves your rankings for search queries, allowing your potential clients to easily discover your content.

Audience Understanding

The Content Marketing Institute defined content marketing thus:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”

Hence audience understanding is critical to content marketing success. Audience research is usually undertaken to understand customer pain points and offer a service to solve those needs. Audience research may include studying the demographics, psychographic, and behavioral data of your potential customers.

There are several ways to conduct an audience study. An often-used audience study is the use of buyer persona. It uses 1 customer to illustrate the needs and wants of your customers. Another great way of audience study is the use of jobs to be done framework to understand your customer pain points. Understanding your customer pain points will help you write content that solves their needs.

Better User Experience

Keyword research enables you to find what keywords and related keywords your target market audience uses in search. You then know what topics and information to focus on in your pages, blog posts, guides, and other content. You will use the right keywords to optimize your content towards solving your customer needs. A well-optimized content enhances the overall use experience, visitors find information that can solve problems leading to increased satisfaction and a higher likelihood of engagement.

Strategic Content Planning

Keyword research enables you to identify gaps, opportunities, and trends in your industry. It enables you to position your content as a valuable resource, gaining an advantage over your competitors.

Keyword research serves as a blueprint for strategic content planning. It guides the creation of relevant, timely, and impactful content that aligns with user intent and business objectives.

Specific keywords to optimize and target a piece of content enable you to track search traffic and engagement metrics on those terms. This presents a way to determine which content resonates with your visitors.

Strategies for Effective Keyword Research

The first step to effective keyword research is to define your digital marketing goals. It could be to increase traffic, lead generation, brand awareness, or conversion using search engine optimization techniques. This should guide your keyword research from a content marketing perspective which is to educate potential customers and earn their confidence. It is best practice to align the SEO strategy and content strategy for effective keyword research.

There are several strategies for effective keyword research in content marketing. Each instance is not done in isolation but is combined with other results in strategic keyword research. Metrics that guide the final selection of relevant keywords include high monthly search volume, low keyword difficulty, and low competition.

Even though high-volume keywords are important to attract traffic. A good SEO strategy will incorporate long-tail keywords typically 3+ words with specific terms. Such keywords have low search volume, but have a better chance for best results compared to short-tail keywords or head terms. Short tail keywords are between 1-3 words, generic, with a high search volume but lower conversion rates.

Using keyword research tools is an important step toward effective keyword research for content marketing. There are many options both paid and free tools. The free tools include Google Keyword Planner though primarily for PPC keyword research, Google Search Console, and Google Trends. Premium SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz Keyword Explorer have free versions though with limitations. If you are on a tight budget like many small businesses, you can subscribe for basic plans in good SEO tools like SE Ranking and Ubersuggest. Keyword research will involve a lot of data gathering, hence a spreadsheet will be indispensable for storing your data for further analysis.

Topical Authority

Your core business is the major service or product you offer to clients. This business needs to be clearly defined. You will need to identify the core topics related to the business. The main pain points you help customers solve should be part of the core topics. Also, identify low competition variations of the core topics that will be subtopics.

The core topics for example a digital marketing agency will be digital marketing and cover related topics. The subtopics can be email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing covering more specific topics. Research search queries users might use to find your services using keyword research tools or interviews with customers. The core topics and subtopics will form part of a topic cluster. It is usually difficult to rank for single search phrases, especially for high-difficulty words.

By building a topic cluster with the core keyword as a pillar page and subtopics as cluster pieces you can gain topical authority to rank for competitive keywords. The pillar page contains an overview of the topic while the cluster pieces are in-depth coverage of the topic. The pillar page and cluster pieces are connected with hyperlinks.

Competitor Keyword Research

There are 2 types of competitors, direct and content or SERP competitors. Direct competitors offer the same services or products as your business. Indirect or content competitors are businesses competing for the same keywords as your business.

Competitor keyword research is best done with keyword research tools like Semrush. Enter your domain in the search bar for Competitive Research > Organic Search. Click on the Results Competitors tab to find your organic competitors. Choose the top 3 or 4 direct competitors for the research.

For each chosen competitor you will enter the domain in Competitive Research > Organic Search. Click on the positions tab to find ranking keywords for the domain.

Your objective could be to target high-volume keywords of your competitors. hence, you can filter keywords with a search volume of 400+ or 500+. Export the data in an Excel sheet, and append all results for all competitors in a single Excel sheet. Remove the duplicates by choosing Data tab > Data tools > Remove duplicates.

Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis

Competitor keyword gap analysis is drawing inferences from common keywords and missing keywords between your website and that of your competitor. The Semrush keyword gap tool makes keyword gap analysis seamless. Enter your domain and that of 3 direct competitors to compare.

The results will present 2 opportunities for improvement:

• Keyword gap weak are keywords in which you rank lower than all your competitors
• Keyword gap missing are keywords your competitors are ranking for but is missing in your pages.

Export the data in a spreadsheet for further analysis

Your Low Hanging Fruit Keywords

Low-hanging fruit terms have a high search volume with low competition and hence are easier to rank. These are keywords you have a chance of ranking based on your website authority. Unfortunately, keywords that rank on Google search page 2 receive little or no clicks because many users do not scroll past page 1.

You can find keywords in positions 11-20 with good search volume like 400+ to optimize and push to the top 3. It offers a quick win opportunity because if your page can rank on page 2 for the keyword it has the potential to move to page 1 with little more effort.

Seed Keyword Research

Seed keywords are keyword phrases containing valuable information about your products or services. The best way to seed keyword research is to make a list of such phrases. You can then use a keyword research tool to find a list of related keywords. Append the results for each seed keyword discovery in an Excel worksheet and remove all duplicates at the end of the research.

Topic Clustering

You will have a big list of keywords from the different keyword research processes undertaken so far. Many of the keywords can be related and should be grouped. Each grouped keyword will form a topic cluster with a pillar page and cluster pieces. The grouping can be done manually but because of the massive size, a keyword clustering tool will be most ideal.

My experience of working with such a tool is that the results may be presented in an Excel pivot table. The grouping may not be perfect; hence you may need skills in manipulating Excel pivot table to adjust.

Prioritized Keyword List

The various research methods undertaken have given rise to many keyword ideas to explore. Now is the time to make a selection of relevant terms based on goals for a keyword strategy. There will be a new list of keywords to create particular topics, and old pages to optimize to rank higher.

Depending on the project scope and goals, I prefer allocating a quota for the prioritized list of keywords to each research method. This is because they address different issues. I usually choose keywords based on the highest monthly volume and least keyword difficulty.

For keywords already ranking:

• I usually filter out user-generated content keywords from forums. This is because of the barrier to optimization.
• I choose 1 keyword for a page filtering out any other instances of that page
• I check the relevance of each keyword from titles, URLs, and meta descriptions before inclusion in the list.

Content Strategy and Plan

The prioritized list of keywords is updated in a content strategy spreadsheet. Keywords with similar intent will be merged into a page, more details on the keywords that will help writers will be updated in the content strategy.

The content plan is the execution guide for the content strategy. It contains information such as content brief links, expected deadline, publication date, writers, and editors in charge of the project.

Measuring the Success of Your Keyword Strategy

One of the best things about digital marketing is the opportunity to measure success with the aid of marketing analytics tools. You can use the free Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure the success of your keyword strategy. Google Search Console presents search query results in the Google search engine while Google Analytics will help find other forms of traffic besides organic traffic.

You can use a minimum of 3 months of performance on search in Google Search Console to find pages that are ranking in Google search. You will use the clicks, impressions, click-through rate CTR, and position to measure success. Pages with clicks indicate organic traffic, the higher the CTR the better. The Google Search Console data can help identify pages to improve. The worst pages are pages without any impressions, such pages need a serious review.

Improving Keyword Strategy

After a performance analysis, the next steps will be improving keyword strategy to impact rankings and organic traffic. The following steps can help towards an improved keyword strategy:

• Outreach for quality external links to your website. Backlinks with anchor text containing your keywords can improve rankings
• Use semantic core, a set of keywords related to a page or business to improve semantic search or search engine’s capability to understand words from the searcher’s intent and their context.
• Refresh old content, updating old pages to optimize them for new relevant keyword opportunities
• Balance high-quality content with effective keyword usage by ensuring keywords are in titles, URL, headers, meta description, and content body.

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