Keyword research is a valuable and necessary skill that all copywriters need to help in their digital marketing strategy. Without this step, you will miss vital information to help your business thrive.
This process helps you understand your audience better, optimise your content based on popular words and phrases in the search bar, and improve your ad targeting and search engine rankings. Keyword research isn’t something you can skip if you hope to succeed.
Here are five ways your time and effort in keyword research will show positive results for your content and business.
1. Perfecting Your Targeting
You already know your target audience, and you craft your services and products to suit their needs - so why aren’t they selling like hotcakes?
The simple answer is that your target audience may choose something other than your website from their list of options in their organic search results.
You must understand their language better to understand your audience, prospects, and customers. For example, if you were looking for somewhere to eat, maybe a bakery, how would you find somewhere? You’re probably thinking something like searching ‘Bakery near me’ in Google. Your goal is to make sure your business pops up on their screen.
So you’ve got onto the search page. What now? Perfecting your targeting isn't only ensuring your website is viewable. You need to craft your H1 heading carefully and the first paragraph in a language they resonate with to entice them.
2. Search Engine Rankings
By researching keywords and incorporating the results into your content, you automatically increase the likelihood that your business page will rank higher in the SERPS (search engine results page).
As we already touched on, showing up on this page is crucial to getting visitors to your site, and the higher you rank on that list, the better!
Using well-researched keywords in your digital marketing strategy to bump you up to those top spots will drive more traffic to your website and increase our visibility online.
3. Ad Targeting
You may decide to invest in ads to grow your pages' reach, which may mean you run a pay-per-click ( PPC) advertising campaign.
These campaigns buy traffic to your website rather than relying on its position on the organic search page. These can appear on social media pages and other websites that offer a space for advertisements, but this form of ad campaign is generally seen on SERPs.
This can be an effective way to drive traffic to your website with a lower risk of financial trouble, and this is because (as the name suggests) advertisers only pay a fee each time their ad is clicked.
So how is this connected to keyword research? The cost you must pay per click will vary depending on the keyword chosen for your advertisement.
Advertisers usually set a maximum keyword bid; the highest bidder will receive the top spot. If there is less competition for a keyword, the CPC paid can be lower than the maximum bid, so keyword research will help you navigate this process and generate more leads and sales for the company.
4. Content Optimisation
As copywriters, we know that you can write impressive content that draws in and captures the attention of your target audience, but there’s already room to improve.
Researching and using the right keywords in your content is the perfect way to do this! SurferSEO is an online tool that provides extensive help in editing content.
Write directly into SurferSEO and receive help from AI technology that checks the prominence of each word among competitor pages based on your topic. Use its accurate and competitive keyword rankings to perfect your content and rank high organically.
It even suggests titles and AI-generated content for ideation, all while scoring your content as you write!
There are lots more online tools that will help you to optimise your content, such as the following:
5. Competitor Analysis
As we have touched on previously in this blog, the world of digital marketing is a battlefield. You are working against your competitors to rank as high as possible, fighting for the leads and potential customers.
Without keyword research, you have a low chance of being visible in SERPs, but utilise keyword research and precisely analyse the keyword usage of competitors before writing content. You can combine the success of the top pages on Google.
In best practice, research your topic by searching your main keyword/topic, and read the top 5 pages that appear, changing your keyword slightly, and repeating this process till you are an expert on the keywords that are grabbing the top spots.
Gaining this insight into digital marketing of other pages about your niche is a great way to help identify areas where your page can improve.
