SEO keywords are words or phrases that define what your content is all about. They are also referred to as search queries because these are the same words and phrases that people enter into search engines when they are looking for information.
Properly leveraged and targeted keywords can significantly influence the success or failure of any marketing strategy. Here are some of the top reasons why keywords are important in digital marketing:
Help Your Audience Find You
The keywords on your website act as a vehicle for your target audience to find the most relevant content on your website. As a business owner, you want to be certain that the keywords you use are directly linked to what your potential customers are interested in and what they are actually searching for.
With proper keyword research and optimization, your audience will be able to see you using the common terms and phrases that they use for search. Keyword research also helps you find the right words and phrases that align with the theme of your business. Consequently, you will also be viewed in a favorable light by search engines.
Identify Your Audience
Keywords serve as the link between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to meet their needs. The keywords you pick to target or include in your content will determine the kind of traffic you’ll get. Essentially, keywords are about your audience as much as they are about your content.
It is possible that you are presenting your content in a different way than how people are searching for it. To ensure that your content ranks well organically and drives the right kind of visitors to your site, you need to understand their needs, such as the language they use and the kind of content they are looking for.
To do this, you have to create a persona for your ideal customer or visitor. A persona acts as a benchmark: it may not represent everything you seek, but by aiming for it, you have a higher likelihood to succeed.
Below are some useful benefits of creating a persona for your digital marketing campaign:
- Understanding your customers’ needs and interests allows you to create content that your audience will find interesting and valuable.
- Knowing where your customers spend most of their time enables you to better target your marketing efforts. You can place ads or promote your content in platforms where your audience is most likely to see and share it.
- You can generate better quality leads and give your marketing campaigns a more personal touch.
- When you know which personas your marketing team should focus more on, you can easily allocate your budget and resources into the right channels that are most efficient for attracting your ideal customer.
- You can build future products and product features that are more closely aligned to your customers’ needs.
If you have no idea how to start creating a persona, a skilled and reliable digital marketing agency can help you truly understand your audience.
Boost Leads and Sales
The most critical function of keywords is to help you obtain high-quality leads. In a nutshell, the keywords you choose should help boost your conversion and, ultimately, increase your revenue.
This is why proper keyword research and optimization are the core aspects of any effective digital marketing campaign. Your choice of keyword phrases should essentially target the kind of web traffic that converts into paying customers. The wrong choice of keywords will attract traffic that does nothing for your bottom line.
An important thing to note is that keyword research and optimization are ongoing processes and are not something that you only do once. Regularly checking your keywords will help you constantly improve your marketing efforts. Remember that people’s interests change so the keywords that may get hundreds of thousands of unique daily searches may eventually get reduced to only a hundred.
Streamline Your Marketing Efforts
Keywords represent what your business is all about—from the products and services you provide to whom you target. Your SEO agency or digital marketer will help you choose the right keywords that enable them to know what kind of content they need to market to get people to notice you. Alternatively, you can also use online tools that will help you in researching keywords that are relevant to your business.
Here are some of the key benefits of using online tools for keyword research:
- These tools offer valuable insight into the number of users searching for any given keyword.
- They let you know how much competition there is for your keyword of choice.
- They can also give you a realistic understanding of the right keywords for your website
- These tools can help you determine how effective a keyword will be for your marketing campaigns.
Create a Content Strategy
Once you know what keywords are most relevant to your website, you can easily create your content strategy around those terms. An effective content strategy will help you gain more digital traction and attract more attention to your brand.
In some cases, you may already have existing content and only need to figure out how to match them with your keywords. A content-to-keyword map will be helpful in this case. This map will provide insight into the impact of your content and determine if there are gaps or weak links that need to be addressed.
A content-to-keyword map includes the following:
- Primary keywords for each piece of content
- Keyword search volume
- Organic traffic
- Page authority
- Other metrics that are crucial for your business
Ideally, every page on your site should target a unique primary keyword. Your homepage should target a broad industry term. Target more specific niche keywords as you create other pages for your site, such as category pages, product pages, and blog articles.
Conclusion
The right keywords do more than just align your content with your marketing strategy. With proper research and optimization, your keywords will also help you boost your bottom line, form deeper and more meaningful connections with your customers, and streamline your marketing processes.