"The beauty of SEO is that, instead of pushing a marketing message onto folks who don't want to hear what you have to say, you can reverse-engineer the process to discover exactly what people are looking for, create the right content for it, and appear before them at exactly the moment they are looking for it. It's pull vs. push."

~ Cyrus Shepard

According to Oxford University Press, a keyword is "a word or concept of great significance, a word that acts as the key to a cypher or code, or an informative word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document." As applied to digital marketing, a keyword is a word or, more commonly, a phrase used to perform a search for information. For example, a traveller asking Google to help find the "best hotels in London" or an automobile enthusiast trying to find "classic car repair shops in Cincinnati." Focusing on keywords like "hotel" or "car repair," Google would then search websites in London or Cincinnati to find possible matches for the request.

Initially, some digital marketers pushed their website to the top of the results page by adding keywords to their pages, regardless of whether they made sense in terms of the website's content or it's relevance to their visitors. The phrase "keyword stuffing" soon came to represent the questionable tactic of trying to manipulate search results. For example, you might see a list of telephone numbers for various cities, blocks of text with different locations, unnatural or overemphatic usage of words or phrases, or just plain lists of keywords at the bottom of each website page.

This strategy worked for some time until the search engines realised it was significantly diluting the results they could provide to users. They updated their search algorithms to reward a positive use of keywords and also began to focus more on other aspects of search relevance. Google even instituted a policy of imposing penalties by lowering search visibility for those websites which were not in compliance with their Webmaster Guidelines.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, also broke off into the sub-category of paid search, with advertisers paying per click (PPC). Here the idea was to find the best combination of keywords for a paid advertisement that would automatically appear at the top of search results to guarantee visibility. 

Although both SEO and PPC are part of effective internet marketing strategies, keyword research is not just a matter of optimising for the search engines. Keyword research allows us to integrate our audience's needs into our messaging and be the one to deliver the most relevant answer to a searcher's enquiry.

Digital marketing plans are now much more sophisticated at including keywords in optimised content as part of an organic, human-focused process. Keywords are now more accurately and effectively thought of in terms of demonstrating relevance, expertise and authority. Content creation needs to be a balance of what works for machines (so your website does appear on search engines) and what works for the audience (so you are useful and relevant to your customers).

What Are Solid SEO Services?

"No website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is technical SEO."

~ Neil Patel

Keyword research should be the very foundation of your content ideation and writing process. A fuller understanding of what your customers and prospects are searching for means you can better formulate content that will respond to their needs. When appropriately executed a better keyword strategy can yield impressive results:

Stronger Internet Marketing Strategy

Understanding what customers are searching for that you also want to rank for allows you to build content to attract their attention. A service like StoryBase, for example, seeks to bridge the gap between what prospects want to know and what marketers want to tell them. This type of reverse search engine aims to help marketers better understand how people are searching the internet so they can provide relevant content that can help influence their purchase decisions.

Keyword Driven Content Strategy

Keywords can be used to improve the structure of online posts. Keyword-driven titles, headings, and subheadings give structure to a piece and provide an answer to the long-tail or voice searches that are becoming ever more popular. Understanding the priority of people's questions through keyword research helps to provide a coherent structure to a piece and provides content headings. Individual pages of content can be targeted to a specific group of keywords, starting with the main topic and moving through related phrases, as opposed to trying to stuff every page with all the applicable keywords.

Competitor Research

Effective marketers are always aware of what their competitors are doing with their keywords. The purpose is to find out what works and what doesn't for competitors, so you can make decisions about whether to incorporate targetting those keywords or phrases in your internet marketing strategy.

Improved Paid Search

If you are going to invest in pay-per-click (PPC) ads, it only makes sense to use those keywords which most effectively target your specific demographic group. PPC ads that match potential search queries will, therefore, appear more often on search result pages.

Improved Organic Search

Effective keyword use helps your website become more relevant and responsive to your customers' queries, so it is more likely to show up higher in the Search Engine Results Page organically.

More Natural Website Flow

As more random keywords are thrown into website pages to try to attract search engine attention, a website can start to lose coherence or a sense of purpose and direction. If there is no clarity of voice from one page to the next, visitors can soon become bored and move on. A stronger keyword understanding can help each page stand more comfortably on its own while still having the benefit of generating a search engine response.

Time Savings

Internet marketers have a great deal of content to generate, and must be aware of keeping within budgetary constraints. Understanding the keywords your audience is using in their searches creates a topic list that helps to narrow the field and reduce the time taken for your ideation and creation process.

Find Better Keywords With Better Keyword Research Tools

"These days, a practitioner of search engine optimisation is more of a content experience analyst who focuses on optimising and deploying content across multiple devices and platforms. It's all about building high-quality, useful, intent-based content for all stages of the buyer journey so as to be there in a consumer's moment of need."

~ Winston Burton

How do you find the best available keywords to reach and attract your audience's attention? We can suggest several effective keyword research tools to assist in this process:

Rank Tracker

This keyword research tool not only helps to find the most comprehensive list of keyword variations, but it also helps to analyse their potential SEO profitability. This suite of 23 keyword tools in one can help with keyword position monitoring, geo-specific ranking, searches beyond Google, long-tail searches, common spelling errors, and more. Most importantly, it helps to analyse the keywords' traffic potential and balance that against how fierce its SEO competition is, so you can focus your SEO efforts on what takes the least effort to bring in the most traffic.

Ubersuggest

Neil Patel's tool is one to have in your back pocket if competitors in the same industry are continually outranking you. This tool is designed to help marketers obtain a better understanding of their competitors' SEO, internet marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing strategies. Type in a domain and see useful data like total traffic numbers, paid ad costs for that domain and an SEO pages report showing what pages are performing the best on a competitor site. It provides keyword insights that can be adopted and translated to help your company gain a specific competitive advantage. Ubersuggest also suggests keywords and content ideas, and helps assess backlink data.

Google Search Console

If you've built what you think is an effective SEO campaign and incorporated keywords into content, meta titles, and image tags, but your traffic isn't budging, why not go directly to the source for help with the best keyword search strategies? The console provides you with an analysed report of your current Google rank positions, click-through rates, and more. A few ways you can use Google Search Console include:

• To see exactly how Google views your website according to its URL

• To see how keywords are performing where clicks are concerned

• To determine what could be tweaked to get better performance

Google's Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner helps analyse current SEO keywords with their average Google positions, impressions and CTRs (Click-Through Rates) to help find areas for potential improvement. You can optimise content with search analytics, get more content on Google, spot and fix website issues, and finally get a better understanding of how Google sees your website pages.

Google Trends

Google Trends is an old-school-but-ever-useful keyword research tool. User patterns for searching specific keywords will vary according to region, and surprisingly, regional differences can vary quite drastically from one location to the next.Just type in a keyword, and you can see how that keyword is trending from location to another. For instance, an attorney's office may find out that keyword phrases containing the word "lawyer" are doing better in one area, while sentences containing attorney are getting more hits in another. For local business owners, tweaking SEO according to geographical search query patterns can make a drastic difference in traffic numbers. 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows users to run a search to discover content ideas quickly, uncover platform insights, and identify passionate influencers who can help build website effectiveness. Key components include discovery, research, identification of influencers, and monitoring.

AnswerThePublic

Simple, straightforward, and useful, this tool helps you build the whole mantra of "They ask, you answer" into your content strategy. Searchers now tend to pose their search queries as natural questions rather than search strings, and that trend continues to be on the upswing with the increased use of voice searches. As a result, marketers need to be able to generate a better understanding of the variety of ways potential customers will phrase their searches. All you have to do is type in your keyword or keyword phrase, and you'll get a helpful spider diagram of recommended questions to work into your content.

Building questions into content allows sites with strong rankings and functional SEO question integration the opportunity to hit that prized "0" position on the Google search results page. That position is reserved for a featured snippet in the form of the answer deemed most likely to answer the search query. According to RankRanger, these featured direct-answer snippets appear in as much as 17.34 percent of current search queries, and the sites landing here benefit from the traffic because of that authoritative spot.

At 1827 Marketing, we use SEO insight as part of our content brainstorming, not only in-house but also with our clients, in order to create beautifully modern marketing. Our platform, talent network and expertise give clients the tools to create campaigns and experiences that deliver results.