Why Good Keyword Research is Crucial for Your Online Marketing Campaign

If you want to run a successful online marketing campaign for your business, good keyword research is a must.

With the help of proper keyword research, you can figure out what people are typing into Google, to find a business like yours. Keyword research also helps you learn more about the needs of your target market, making it easier for you to improve your business offering.

In this post, we’re going to explore a few of the tactics you can use to conduct keyword research. We’ll look at the services you can use to find keywords and how you can tell the ‘good’ keywords apart from the ‘bad’.

Once you’ve finished reading, you’ll know exactly how you can use keyword research to create a winning online marketing campaign.

The Two Marketing Scenarios that Demand Keyword Research

When it comes to search engines, an online marketing campaign can be split into two categories –

1. Paid marketing
2. Organic marketing

If you want your website to be listed in the search engines, you can either pay for the privilege using platforms like Google AdWords or Bing Advertising, or you can do something known as SEO (to aid organic marketing).

With AdWords, you have to pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement in the search engine listings. With SEO, however, your site is shown in the organic positions of the search engine listings for free and you don’t have to pay when someone clicks on your website link.

No matter which option you decide to pursue, to get the best possible results you need to make sure you are targeting the right keywords. This means you need to figure out the keywords your target audience is typing into Google, to find businesses like yours.

While you can use guesswork to identify these keywords, the better approach is to use free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner. Which we’re going to take a look at in the next section. Or if you have the budget you could do a lot worse than paying for tools like the excellent KWFinder.

Using the Google Keyword Planner to Find The Best Keywords

The Google Keyword Planner is a free tool provided by Google, that provides insight into the keywords people are typing into Google. You’ll need to set up a Google Adwords account to use the tool.

Using it, you can figure out the following:

• What keywords people are typing in
• The estimated number of times a certain keyword is being searched for
• The amount advertisers are willing to pay for their website to be shown when a certain keyword is typed in (known as Cost Per Click or CPC). This also gives you an indication of how competitive that keyword might be to rank for organically.

To find good keywords related to your business, you need to provide this tool with a generic keyword based on your offering. Suppose you have a window cleaning business – you’d type in ‘window cleaning.’ When you do this, the tool will return a wide range of keywords related to that initial keyword.

Alongside these keywords, you can see how much advertisers are willing to pay, so that their website pops up when this keyword is typed in.

This data is important because the more advertisers are willing to pay, the more likely it is that a certain keyword is going to produce customers. This might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s the keywords with the highest CPC, not the highest search volume, that often produces the most customers. Of course, these customers come at a price.

To reduce your total spend with Adwords you can limit the time of day your campaign runs for or only advertise in specific locations. Going back to the ‘window cleaning’ analogy you wouldn’t want the campaign running during the night or in a location you couldn’t possibly service.

So, if you’re going to run a paid campaign, you can just select the keywords shown and run paid advertising campaigns targeting them. If, however, you don’t have the budget to pay for ads, you might want to use the SEO approach – which we’re going to cover in the next section.

How to Target Keywords for an SEO Online Marketing Campaign

As mentioned, SEO is a great marketing approach because it gives you the chance to get in front of your target audience, without having to pay. The trade-off, however, is that it can take a while for SEO to kick in.

The approach to SEO is very similar to the approach you’d take for paid advertising. This time, however, when you find keywords that look as though they’d provide a return on investment, you’re not going to give Google money.

Instead, you’re going to create content (of which you host on your blog), based on those specific keywords.

This content will then rank in the organic search listings, for your chosen keyword. As a result, your business will be put in front of people willing to pay you for your service, without you having to pay advertising fees for this exposure.

If you want to get results with an SEO online marketing campaign, there are two things that you need to focus on –

1. Creating great content
2. Building high-quality links

The concept of ‘great content’ is subjective. What counts as great, largely depends on how good existing content is, in relation to a specific keyword. If you want to create content that is likely to rank in Google, you need to focus on creating something better than what your competitors have created. Only then will Google begin to consider ranking your content highly.

You also need to focus on building high-quality links. Links are like votes from across the web. They vouch for the quality of your content. The easiest way to build links is by reaching out to people who’ve linked to or shared content similar to yours in the past. When reaching out, let them know you’ve created something better and ask politely if they’d link to it or share it.

With SEO, you can never know for sure if you’re going to be able to rank for a specific keyword. To increase your chances of success, make sure you are continually creating content – all of which targets a wide range of customer generating keywords.

Keyword King?

In this post, we’ve taken a look at the importance of keyword research and how you can find the ‘right’ keywords for your online marketing campaigns.

We also took a look at how you can put those keywords into action, so you can get your business in front of people that are willing to do business with you. Whether you use AdWords or SEO, there’s a lot of opportunities out there.

Whichever route you take, the most important thing is that you take action now, so that you can experience results as soon as possible.

Do you need help with your digital marketing? Contact us to see how we can help you!