Have you been struggling to come up with keywords for your content marketing briefs lately? Communicating the right topics and titles to your content marketing agency will give them a better chance of crafting content that is tailored for your target audience.
Basic keyword research can be conducted in a few minutes with a quick Google search or two, but you may find that a more in-depth and comprehensive process can improve the quality of your content output and get more customers clicking through to your site to buy products.
Use Google Trends
Google revealed this week that certain product categories are trending higher amid the global pandemic. Digging into what’s hot with customers, especially with general business conditions being so challenging at the moment, is a great way to go deeper with your keyword research.
Making sense of the recent disruptions caused by COVID-19 can also improve the relevance of your content, which is exactly what consumers are looking for right now.
Google noted: “Last month, there were spikes in search interest for household supplies and jigsaw puzzles as people spent more time at home.
“This month we’ve seen surging interest for sewing machines and baking materials in the U.S., and tetherball sets and chalk in the United Kingdom and Australia.”
If you want to find out exactly what is trending, navigate to the Google Trends website where there is a wealth of data with visual representations of insights and stories.
You can also enter a search term or topic to see the ‘interest over time’ and ‘interest by sub region’ for a particular keyword. This is useful for seeing how the coronavirus has had an impact on the popularity of certain terms in recent weeks and how it differs by country.
The keyword ‘game’, for example, has been trending quite a bit higher since the middle of March. This may be because more people are interested in playing and buying games to pass the time during the lockdown. You can use this sort of information to support your content marketing campaigns.
Get to know the person behind the persona
Pitching content to personas created from data can seem a bit impersonal. To really master your marketing, you could try to find out your target audience’s personality traits, interests, values and opinions.
You can do this by contacting them regularly with surveys, conducting general research, listening in on social networks and conducting interviews.
Why is all of this important? Knowing your audiences better will make it easier to create an accurate and relevant list of keywords and topics that can be covered using content formats including news and blogs.
The more you understand about your audience, the better you will get at crafting compelling user experiences, optimising content for them, and generally putting forth messages that will resonate with them and prompt them to take action.
Regularly conducting this sort of analysis will keep you up to speed with what customers need most and will have the knock-on effect of ensuring that your keyword research is always that bit more personal. It can really pay off in the long run.
Use a mix of different tools
Standard keyword research tools are great for streamlining the whole process. However, thinking outside the box and using a mix of different software can offer a more detailed and rich tapestry of phrases and terms for you to focus on when you next greenlight a content campaign.
The aforementioned Google Trends is a less granular option for coming up with keywords, as is Seed Keywords, a new tool that allows you to create different scenarios for search queries in order to build a larger seed keyword list.
Don’t stop using traditional tools as they are very useful for research, but always try to think of less conventional ways to identify new keyword opportunities.
Don’t forget search intent
Google is doing everything it can at the moment to tease out a user’s search intent. Recent improvements to its search algorithm have focused on making better sense of what phrasing and words mean and how they fit together, rather than just viewing a query as a single whole.
Finding out what the search intent is for keywords that are ranking at the top of Google will help you to come up with content that meets a user’s needs.
For example, the phrase ‘bubble tea’ could have been entered with the intent of either trying to find out exactly what bubble tea is or looking for websites that offer it for sale.
You can kill two birds with one stone here by creating content that satiates a user’s need to know intent and the desire to purchase intent depending on what your company offers.
Determining and understanding the intent of queries will enable you to craft targeted content for keywords that are ranking in SERPs. It effectively adds another layer of context to your keyword research. A couple of tools that can help you to find out the pages that are ranking for your keywords are SEMrush and SpyFu.
Consider questions
Searchers are always asking questions and you have an opportunity to answer them via compelling and engaging content and webpages. Follow up your keyword research with a quick look at the questions associated with keywords that users are regularly asking.
There are several websites that allow you to do this. AnswerThePublic, for example, offers a visual representation of these questions broken down into ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘why’, ‘which’, ‘will’, ‘where’, ‘what’, ‘are’ and ‘can’.
People will always phrase questions in different ways when using your target keywords. Understanding how they will ask them can again make it that bit easier for you to create content that does the best job of answering them. The search intent also plays a role here.
To conclude, taking the time to determine the intent, phrasing and questioning of your target keywords can improve the quality of your briefs and allow creatives to craft content that works.
