Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for any digital marketing venture; however, it’s not just about writing content. If you’re just writing content daily without a plan, research or keywords, then you’re wasting your time. To ensure your content drives long-term growth and results and is fully optimised it’s essential to complete in-depth keyword research.
Know what your target audience is searching for
The cornerstone of a successful SEO strategy is knowing what your target audience is searching for. By knowing what your target audience is searching for and the key topics that they’re typing into search engines you can tailor your content effectively to ensure that they find you.
You can find this out through:
- In-Depth Audience Research: Research your target audience’s interests, pain points, and questions that they frequently ask.
- Analyse Competitors: Find out what topics and keywords your direct competitors are targeting.
- Use Tools: Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to gain insights into user search queries.
Complete keyword research
In addition to knowing what your audience is searching for, you also need to understand the core keywords and phrases that they’re using and that you need to be targeting. Luckily, there are many great Google and third-party tools that can help you complete comprehensive keyword research so you don’t miss anything.Â
But the best place to start is just to:
- Brainstorming Keywords: Spend a little time brainstorming all of the keywords that you believe are relevant to your business and your audience. Think of all the things you could type into Google to bring up your website.
- Using a Keyword Planner Tool: Next, put this initial list into a keyword planner tool to expand on it and get more terms to consider.
- Refining Your List: Finally, spend some more time going through this list, cutting out any terms that you believe are irrelevant and then organising the remaining keywords into clusters based on priority and relevance.
Find the themes
Now that you have a list of relevant keywords, you need to humanise the list – while Google can give you exact matches, it can’t think like a human. So, all of the results will be based on themes and ideas rather than natural thought processes. So, what you need to do is group relevant keywords that are similar to each other into a theme to get more natural ideas:
- Group Keywords: Identify any common themes among your keywords. For instance, if you have 400 keywords, you might end up with 30-40 themes that group them together.
- Strategic Planning: Themes give you a strategic way to address the types of search queries people are typing.
Identify your keyword rankings
For those themes, there’ll be predominant keywords in each, that are ranking higher. You can then break those rankings down into three core categories:Â
- Page One: Keywords where you’re already on the first page. Fine-tune and optimise this content to improve your position.
- Page 20 to 50: Keywords where you’re on pages 20 to 50. Google recognises your content but doesn’t see you as a top, relevant authority figure. You need to enhance your content.
- Rank 50 or Beyond: For keywords where you rank 50 or beyond, Google doesn’t identify the keyword with your website. These keywords are essentially useless to you, so if they’re important you’ll need to consider creating new content that specifically targets these words.
Analyse the gaps
These rankings will give you a blanket of the 40 things that you’re targeting. But the importance lies in the gaps and the things you’re not targeting that you should be. Completing gap analysis will allow you to compare your current rankings with your target rankings so you can see exactly where you can improve:
- Identify Shortfalls: Determine what’s not working and where your campaigns are falling short of where you want them to be, especially in comparison to your competitors.
- Assess Strategies: Create strategies that target your gaps to climb the rankings and reach more of your audience.
Create SEO content
Now that you have a list of specific and relevant keywords and know where you need to improve to climb the ranks all that’s left to do is make the required amendments:Â
- Adjust Existing Content: Rewrite or edit any content that is ranking poorly to include your new keywords more effectively.
- Create SEO content: Write or create new blogs, social posts, ads or videos that target your lower-ranking keywords to effectively boost them and prove their relevance to your campaign.
Enjoy higher ranking by optimising your content with keywords
Effective SEO content starts with thorough keyword research, understanding your audience’s search intent, and strategically organising keywords. By implementing these simple tricks and strategies, you can effectively boost your rankings and online visibility so you can increase your chances of attracting high-quality organic traffic to your website.
