Your Guide to Creating a Keyword Strategy

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

When creating and implementing a digital marketing campaign, you first need to design your keyword strategy. This strategy is more than just finding keywords that will bring you the highest number of visitors. It’s a top-to-bottom concept that will influence how you design your site, select keywords, optimize your pages and measure the success of your campaign.

Define Your Keyword Goals

Before you can start delving into keywords, search intent, search volume and click-through rate, you have to define what it is you’re trying to accomplish with your SEO. After all, how can you be successful if you don’t even know what you want? There are two basic goals when it comes to SEO campaigns:

• Conversion: This is the most common campaign goal when it comes to digital marketing. Using a conversion goal means you want your keywords to attract users that wind up converting on your website, whether that be making a purchase, completing a contact form, signing up for an email newsletter or downloading an app. If you go this route, you should focus more on longtail commercial keywords.
• Branding: This campaign is looking to generate lots of impressions and pageviews and focuses less on conversions that happen on the landing page, if they are even possible. For a branding campaign, ranking highly is its own reward as it establishes your brand as a thought leader and an important player in your niche.

You aren’t constrained to one or the other though. You can use a hybrid keyword strategy by dedicating the majority of your keywords (around 80-90%) to a longtail approach, while reserving the remaining for keywords that will get your brand and content in front of a lot of eyeballs.

How you define success will impact the keywords you choose and how you evaluate their performance.

Measuring Success

Before you begin any marketing campaigns you need to ask yourself, "what does success look like?" Or, what metric will you track to determine if you’re achieving your campaign goal? When talking about an SEO campaign, most people first think of measuring improvements to your site’s ranking, or increasing the number of new visitors. If you’re running a branding campaign, then these are your top metrics to track. However, you should also keep track of important SEO indicators like click through rate (CTR), time spent on site and bounce rate, as these metrics will help you evaluate your landing pages’ relevance to the target keywords and content quality.

If you are measuring your campaign against a conversion goal, determining success by SERP ranking and traffic is overly simple, and can even cause you to waste time and effort optimizing pages for keywords that aren’t achieving your goal. To measure your conversion campaign, use your analytics to evaluate visitor behavior by keyword. Some important metrics to track for conversions:

• Pages/visit: How many pages are users viewing per visit? This will tell you whether or not your site is engaging users and piquing their interest in your products or services.
• Bounce rate: A high bounce rate can be a sign of a few different issues with your keyword, your page or both, which we’ll cover in a little bit.
• Average time on site: Do users leave your page right after arriving? This is often closely related to bounce rate — low time on site and high bounce rate is a sign that your page’s content doesn’t jive with your keywords.

And, finally, the most important metrics to track for conversion campaigns are conversions and conversion rate. The reason you want to track indicators other than just conversions is because that number alone doesn’t give you much context, and you could otherwise be missing opportunities to target keywords that have higher conversion rates.

How to Choose Keywords

Now that you know what endgame you’re optimizing for, you can start to find keywords to target with your SEO. To get the best list possible, start with your product (or service). Ideally, you know this inside and out. Start by brainstorming keywords that come to mind when you think of your business, or how you would answer the question "What is my website about?" or “What does my business do?”

Since Google’s Hummingbird update, it’s more important than ever to base your keyword strategy around the way humans use and interact with search engine results. Target keywords that will help you answer questions that users would ask in order to learn more about your industry, company and products.

One nice in-house resource you have for this is your very own customer service team. Keep a record of the conversations you have with your customers, or if you’re big enough, have your customer success team keep track of their tickets. Take note of:

• The most commonly asked questions your CS team handles.
• Any particular features and/or services people ask about or mention, both positive and negative.
• Any concerns or comments left by customers.

This exercise will result not only in a better experience for your customers, but a solid list of potential keywords for you as well. If people are contacting you to ask a question or leave a comment, you can bet they’ve already done so online.

If you have a search bar on your site, update the settings in your Google Analytics account to track what your users are searching for. Click on the Admin tab then under View, select View Settings and switch Site search Tracking on. You can then provide the query parameter used in your search URLs to begin tracking. This will help you to understand user intent, as well as highlighting content gaps where no relevant content exists on your site based on the search query used.

Continue reading %Your Guide to Creating a Keyword Strategy%

by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint