The general philosophy of inbound marketing is all about building great content that increases web visitors while generating and nurturing leads. But if that content is not optimized for search engines, you’re missing out on a significant opportunities.
Any inbound marketer knows just how important SEO is to successful inbound marketing. But you may not be aware just how much keyword research matters in creating an inbound strategy that sets you apart from your competition and reliably attracts visitors to your website. Here’s why.
The Basics of Keyword Research
Keyword research, in essence, consists of finding the right words and phrases for which to optimize your website. If you can find a phrase that is relevant to your industry, generates a good number of searches every month, and is only reasonably competitive, you have a great chance of building your website in a way that gets it to the first page of Google results.
As such, any good web design and SEO strategy has to begin with the research phase. But in reality, the same tasks can be just as successful in helping you with other aspects of inbound marketing, as well.
Growing Visitors Through Relevant Content
Keyword research allows you to find the phrases for which your audience searches. That makes it far more than a helpful tool in building your website; in fact, it can direct your content strategy.
Think about it: if a large amount of visitors search for a specific phrase, they would probably love to read content on that phrase. In other words, if you find audiences searching for affordable fashion boutique, you may want to build and write content that helps your would-be customers in the fashion world find just that.
Content marketing is a core part of the inbound philosophy–and content can only be successful if it touches on topics of interest for your audience. Through keyword research, you can ensure that each blog post, whitepaper, and ebook you write accomplishes that goal.
Creating Unique Content for Maximum Success
Another part of keyword research is understanding just how your competitors use SEO to make their website stand out. In some cases, you can embrace competition. But in most, your goal should be to find a phrase that is popular but little-used for your optimization efforts.
And again, the same truth holds in building your content. You don’t want to be the 100th person in your industry to write on a given topic; instead, strive to be the first that finds a new, but still popular niche.
The variety of competitive keyword tools available for free or a small fee online can help to get you started. Analyze which keywords are popular for your competition, and which are underutilized so far. Then, pounce on that keyword with high-quality content.
Getting Started in Keyword Research
In short, your keyword research efforts are not just limited to SEO applications. In addition, they can play a crucial role in helping you build your content library, and succeed in inbound marketing.
You do, of course, have to embrace keyword research in a strategic way. This tutorial on the subject can get you started. Once you familiarize yourself with the concept, here are some tools you can use to perfect your strategy.
Ultimately, you can use the same concept to benefit both your inbound marketing and SEO efforts. Keyword research does not have to be done more than once; you can, however, use it periodically to verify whether your web design and your content marketing strategy can continue to succeed in attracting and and piquing your audience’s interest. The result will be a more successful digital marketing strategy, built directly on your audience’s preferences and search behaviors.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call or send us a note today at Small Dog Creative 661-702-1310!
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