The Importance of Keywords
Keywords form a very firm foundation of success in the digital marketing world and your four pillars of promotion. If you simply write an engaging and informative article for your target audience, you can’t expect it to be discovered organically anymore. Keyword optimisation is a key strategy to make sure that search engines can actually read what you write.
Once upon a time, the practice of stuffing lots of keywords into your content was sufficient to drive traffic to your website. By now, SEO practices have become vastly more sophisticated and there are more advanced techniques required to obtain the desired results.
Keyword optimisation—otherwise known as keyword research—is a crucial component of a content marketing campaign, despite a little touch of controversy surrounding its importance. So how important are keywords anyway?
The function of keywords is to assist your tribe in connecting with your content when they search for it, and ensuring that they know it’s relevant to them. They are also essential for being visible to the Google web spiders, which then become effective at positioning the content for the right audience in a search.
Adding Keywords to Content
When we search for a single word, such as movies, we are opening up a very broad search and will obtain literally thousands of results relating to movies, from screenings to the latest news stories. It’s like a large funnel that draws from the ocean of information relating to movies that’s out there in cyberspace. This is an example of a short-tail keyword.
Long-tail keywords are when we narrow down the search by inputting additional words such as ‘best movies of 2017’. Now we will get access to information that is more specific.
When adding keywords to our content on your website we need to use a very targeted approach to reach our tribe. If we communicate our core brand message using long-tail keyword phrases we are more likely to attract the right traffic and build our tribe more effectively. In using a single word it’s much harder to attract the right audience than if we approach it with the laser targeting of long-tail keywords.
Resources
There are multiple online tools at our disposal when conducting research to find the right keywords for your audience. Plus there are always new trends to follow. Here are three of our favourites:
1. Google Autocomplete
This simple approach harnesses the power of Google’s autocomplete feature by checking what Google offers up when you input your potential keyword candidates. Although this tool will also throw out content from your search history, it’s still useful in establishing some basic keyword results.
2. Google AdWords: Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner works to find the keywords that are most relevant to your business. You can also compare keyword trends, see how often the keywords are searched, and how their search volume changes over time. It’s a very user friendly tool and a great choice for ease of use and functionality.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush assists in finding the right keywords for your target audience. It assists in finding long-tail keywords and acts as a powerful generator to enlarge the keyword pool for your website.
Developing A Strategy
Armed with a long list of potential keywords, we now need to devise the best strategy for putting them into practice. With the long list of words that you have obtained from your research, you now need to whittle it down to the best performing words and phrases. A tool like Serpstat can help to define your list more accurately by showing us statistics on keyword performance.
Having an idea of your customer avatar is an ideal way to know how to communicate and who you’re communicating to. Knowing the language they use, their likes, dislikes and habits will help you craft your content accurately.
A Final Word
Ultimately your SEO strategy must be very comprehensive and not entirely reliant on the appropriate use of keywords to get top results. This is an important component of digital marketing but it’s not the only factor.