You may not think keywords influence your business, but the reality is they make your online business. To gain traffic to your site and sell your online courses, it is necessary to understand these powerful bite-sized bits that should be sprinkled throughout content. Let’s start at a beginner level for those who do not understand keywords in relation to marketing.
Keywords are ideas or topics that define a piece of content. Keywords can be a string of phrases that an individual (your target audience) would be searching for on a search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
There are two types of keywords:
NOTE: Long-tail keywords are better for your overall marketing strategy because of the decrease in competition. The more specific you can be, the better the audience and relevancy of content to them.
When establishing keywords, you should think about a few things:
For example:
*If you offer multiple services, you need to have those as keywords such as:
You can execute keyword research two ways: by hand or through an online program.
If your keyword list is about ten keywords, no need to pay for a service; however, if you’ve gathered a list of 50+ keywords (because of circumstances such as having multiple locations or service lines) then you will need to enlist the help of a service.
If you are executing keyword research by hand, develop an excel spreadsheet (that has tabs for each month because you’ll want to do this at the end of every month) with the list of keywords, a rank column, a notes column, and a competition column.
Keyword | Rank (Page #, and space) | Notes | Competition |
Keyword #1 | 1 #2 | *space is a blog | Murray & Murray SW, Highland Ave & Friends |
Keyword #2 | 2 #2 | *space is a blog | Murray & Murray SW |
Keyword #3 | 1 #1 | Highland Ave & Friends | |
Keyword #4 | 1 #1 | – |
When listing competition, list anyone before you. Only search to the bottom of the second page.
According to a 2014 study from Advanced Web Rankings, more than 67% of all clicks on SERPs go to the top five listings. I recommend looking at page two because ranking on page two is different than not ranking at all. Ranking on page two means there is a bit more work involved such as developing social media advertisements to gain more traffic to that page.
Google Ads can be used for a few things: keyword planning, keyword strategy and search engine marketing. With Google Ads, this can be effective when you want to start buying spaces to rank.
Using Google Ads and search engine marketing can help you see where your keywords are at while also gaining consumer awareness on Google.
There are also free software platforms for keyword research such as Ant Rank, SERPs, and MOZ (30-day free trial). If you do your own Google search, there are many others as well.
Keyword research may seem daunting, but there are simple things you can do to get started. The important thing is to get started. Keywords are the building blocks of your content marketing strategy and without them, you’re building on shaky ground.
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