If you wanted to boil Inbound Marketing down to single starting point, keywords are it.
In our new eBook - Inbound Marketing: The Essential Step-By-Step Guide, we start the 8-step process with a review of the importance of having a good keyword strategy. It is fundamental to your Inbound Marketing program.
What is a Keyword?
A keyword is a word or phrase that a person enters into a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo, or on a social media site like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Why Build a Keyword Strategy?
More and more people are finding businesses online through search engines. In fact some experts say that the buying cycle starts with the search engine as the vast majority of people use a search engine to research their purchase, and start narrowing down their decision from there.
How do potential buyers find what they want?
By using keywords of course!
Fortunately, you can take advantage of people searching for you by leveraging SEO, optimizing your website around the keywords that are relevant to your business and which keywords you think people are using to find you online. This will increase your chances of getting found by people searching with those keywords, which will drive more and better quality traffic to your business’ website.
While it’s difficult to know exactly which keywords will get the most relevant people to find your business, there are ways to determine the popularity and competitiveness of certain keywords. You can also test and analyze how effective different keywords are in drawing visitors to your site.
As a business professional, you should make sure the right people are finding your business online.
In this section, you will learn how to define which keywords will maximize your potential to draw in relevant traffic from search engines.
Keyword research is an ongoing process that should be followed closely. It gives valuable insight in terms of industry trends and product demand. Comprehensive keyword research can help a business grow its organic traffic and save you from spending money on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns such as Google AdWords.
How to Create a Keyword Strategy
1. Create a list of 10-15 keywords relevant to your business.
Think like you’re using the brain of someone searching for your product with a search engine. For small- and medium-sized businesses, your keywords are not your brand name. Instead, think of words and short phrases that get to the core of what your product or service is about.
2. Choose keywords based on difficulty and relevance.
The keywords you choose should be based on difficulty and relevance.
Some very general keywords such as “marketing” or “business” are very competitive, making it harder to rank well for them in search engine results.
If you are a small- or medium-sized business, you probably want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business (these are commonly referred to as long tail keywords).
The greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is. There are a number of different tools you can use to determine the competitiveness of a specific keyword as well as suggest and help you brainstorm new keyword ideas. A good tool to use is the Google Keyword Tool.
Another important factor for picking keywords is their relevance to your business. While some obscure terms might be easy to rank for, they might not be relevant to your business.
You should find a balance between relevance and difficulty. Choose about 10-15 keywords that match your business well.
Note that these keywords do not have to be perfect at first. You can try out different ones to see which work best for you. This will be discussed more in the ‘Analyze & Refine Strategies’ section (Step Eight of the Inbound Marketing: The Essential Step-By-Step Guide).
3. Design and optimize your website around your keywords.
Now that you’ve chosen your keywords, you should incorporate them into your website.
Last Words - Avoid 'Keyword Stuffing'
There is a cautionary note. After reading this, you might think, “Keywords are really important. If having keywords all over my page helps me rank for them, I should just fill my page with these keywords."
I'm afraid it's not that easy. Apart from leading to a bad experience for website visitors, search engines are smart enough to detect these behaviors. Trying to 'trick' search engines is not a good SEO strategy, and sacrificing readability for SEO is not a good idea either. Our tip is to write your content targetted at us humans not search engine robots.
About Terry Marketing
Terry Marketing (www.terrymarketing.com) is an Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing Services to small and medium sized businesses. We're focused on generating traffic, leads and sales and we're experts in the Inbound Marketing, lead generation process and how to increase website traffic, leads and website conversion rates. Terry Marketing is a Hubspot Partner, a certified HootSuite Ambassador agency, and is a certified Google Partner.
David Terry is CEO of Terry Marketing and Professor of Internet Marketing at Laurentian University. He has a deep knowledge in all aspects of Inbound Marketing, the Internet and Web technologies - as well as an understanding of the importance of how branding, marketing strategy and creative execution can impact business results. You can reach him by phone at 416.204.0255 or email at: david@terrymarketing.com or visit www.terrymarketing.com
