If you are looking to raise awareness of your brand and increase traffic to your website, content marketing is crucial.
You can use content marketing to rank for more keywords, and there are several ways in which you can identify new keywords, which you can in turn use to generate ideas for content marketing.
Marketing strategy consultant Sarah Goliger, writing for digital marketing news website Business 2 Community, outlined a step-by-step approach to choosing the right keywords, which she describes as being the foundation of the close association between content and SEO.
According to Goliger, every page you add to your website provides you with an opportunity to rank in search results, so by creating content you can add more pages to your website incorporating fundamental SEO elements – unique page names, meta descriptions and URLs – helping you to rank for more keywords.
Ranking
The first step is to find out which keywords you already rank for. Use a free tool such as HubShout, SEMrush or SpyFu to find how highly you rank for each keyword and to see who your top competitors are for organic keyword rankings, as well as how many of your keywords they rank for.
The next step is so make a list of keywords you are not ranking for that are relevant to your audience and can be used as inspiration for new content. Choose some that have not yet been incorporated into any of your marketing, as these will enable you to try out new topics.
Once you have done that, enter your list of keywords into the Keyword Planner tool on Google Adwords, which will suggest hundreds of related keywords. The tool also enables you to see the amount of times a month each keyword is searched for and how competitive it is. Use the tool to broaden your list.
Incorporating
The keywords that will be the best fit are those that are most relevant, have high search volume and have low competition – essentially, those that people are searching for, but your competitors are not using. You can identify these keywords by downloading your list from the Keyword Planner tool as an Excel file and sorting the data accordingly.
Choose between ten and-20 keywords, and then think about all the different ways you could create content based on them. For example, you could publish an ebook or whitepaper based on one of your keywords, then create a landing page for it by including the keyword in the page title, meta description, content and URL, optimising it for search.
Goliger concludes by stating that keyword discovery should be an ongoing process for it to continue inspiring new content and improving your SEO.
