But many people only use keyword research to polish content after it has been created. This process is at best time-consuming and at worst creates roadblocks to getting your content out where people can find it.
Create a keyword plan before you start writing
It is much more sensible to do your keyword research before you start any writing. Why? Because then you’ll:
- know that people are genuinely interested in what you’re writing about
- be able to structure your article using keywords throughout
- find that the structure makes writing easier, and that the resulting copy is easier to read
- create search engine friendly copy easily in record time – and that will save money on later optimization.
Keyword exercise
Here’s an exercise to stimulate a useful content brainstorming session.
1) Preparation. Pick a number of important market sectors for your business and draw up a list of at least 50 keywords for each. Check the popularity of each keyword and rank them in descending order.
2) Get your team together for the brainstorm (if you work on your own, ask some of your current customers or friends familiar with your business to help). Tell the team that their task is to build lists of important issues in each of your market segments.
- What are customers looking for?
- What problems do they encounter?
- What benefits do your products bring?
- What is making news in the sector?
- What new trends are emerging?
- What will the future be like?
And so on.
Generate lists for each of your target segments, then rank them in whatever terms you like. That might be on their importance, on the level of difficulty in addressing them, or matching your company abilities or priorities.
3) This is where the fun can really start. Get your team to consider first the list of keywords, then a list of issues in your sector, and then match them to create an idea for an article, a report or any other type of content.
Here’s how the Keywords tool can help
Wordtracker’s tools can help you find ideas for creating content. Use the Related Keywords feature (the orange tool), which appears when you click on ‘Show’.
Figure 3.1: Click on ‘Show’ to reveal the tool
When you do this you’ll see the related tool slide in from the left.
Here’s the Related Keywords tool – it’s ready to use immediately.
Figure 3.2: Use the Related Keywords feature to generate new content ideas
Just enter a seed word or short phrase into the seed word box and click ‘Search’.
This can be any word or phrase that’s relevant to your business.
The tool then gives you up to 300 suggestions for keywords that may be useful for you.
Using related keywords can expand your thinking about which keywords to use, or even which new niches to target.
Keywords can help your creative thinking
Here’s an example: let’s imagine you’ve just developed a tremendous allergy treatment, based entirely on natural ingredients and you want to set up a website to sell your great invention to the world.
Many people would start their search around the solution – the ‘natural ingredients’ that made your product different. Do that and you’ll probably find a small market niche and like many online businesses you may succeed but you probably won’t thrive.
You’ve concentrated on selling your solution before you’ve fully understood what people are looking for and all the niches that exist. There is a simple process for expanding your keyword lists – and your potential audience:
(i) Start with a single idea and explore the market around it. In our example we’re going to explore all the keywords around the keyword allergy.
(ii) Sort the keyword results into groups of people searching for similar things.
What problems are your potential customers trying to solve? Well, it’s obvious that the person who enters the keyword When does the allergy season start will be trying to solve a very different problem to the person who enters I’m allergic to dogs. So, our keyword research will help us identify the problems our potential customers want to solve. Which will give us ideas for the content we should be creating.
(iii) Dig deep into each group to find specific problems that you can solve.
(iv) Create optimized content that addresses these problems.
This thinking is laid out in more detail in our "Keyword Basics" guide, which you’ll receive when you take a 7-day free trial with Wordtracker. If you haven’t yet read it, you can get a copy here, and if you haven’t already taken the free trial, click here.
However, the important point to remember now is: try not to create content until you’ve done your keyword research.
Generate hundreds of great content ideas
Let’s take allergy as our first keyword to look into. Type allergy into the search box and click on ‘Search.’
Figure 3.3: Type in your keyword and click on ‘Search’
The Keywords tool will give you 300 suggestions for related keywords. A great start! From the first 100 alone I get some great suggestions:
anaphylaxis
asthma
hay fever
rhinitis
eczema
allergens
…and so on.
All are terms that you might not have thought of immediately, even if you were an allergy expert. All can be used to create relevant content for your site. You can do this on as many keywords as you choose.
Using keyword research in this way will give you any number of suggestions for content pieces to publish on your website – you’ll never be short of an idea again.
Post from: wordtracker.com
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