The keyword discovery process is critical for managing enterprise projects, as it forms the bedrock of brand messaging in search and social for large-scale websites or multiple brand sites under one corporate umbrella. This process is similar to keyword discovery for smaller sites; however, the difference in scale makes the process more complex.
here are three main steps you need to take when preparing for Enterprise Keyword Discovery:
- Incorporate the social voice of the customer into your keyword and content research. This ensures that your page content is relevant and timely for users searching for solutions.
- Identify the specific webpages that are most relevant to those keywords.
- Determine what landing pages are likely to have the strongest impact on visiting consumers, or are in need of content changes and/or complete overhauls.
But first let us define first what is keyword research and why it is important
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy.
People use keywords to find solutions when conducting research online. So if your content is successful in getting in front of our audience as they conduct searches, you stand to gain more traffic. Therefore, you should be targeting those searches.
In addition, in the inbound methodology, we don’t create content around what we want to tell people; we should be creating content around what people want to discover. In other words, our audience is coming to us.
This all starts with keyword research.
Now, lets discuss the keyword discovery process for enterprise sites.
Keyword discovery process for enterprise sites
Mining For Keywords
As every experienced SEO knows, integrating with Google’s Keyword Tool is not enough as relying on Google presents a challenge. Not only is it a limited source of data, but if everyone is using Google’s Keyword Tool, then you have limited opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition.
You need a tool that integrates with many other “sources” as well, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Competitive Pages, Link Hubs and your Paid Search campaigns. Integrating with other data sources, including Social, is becoming more and more important as we continue to see social signals playing a larger role in the SERPs.
Keyword Suggestions From Social Sources
Incorporating keyword suggestions from Social sources such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube helps to ensure that the keywords you target include the same “jargon” that your target audience uses to refer to your products or non-branded terms within the industry.
Example: I’m reminded of a conversation with a large PC Manufacturer where their SEO Manager was trying to help identify the best non-branded targeted keywords for one of their PC models. High query volume keywords such as “laptop” or “desktop” were too broad and offered no differentiation from any other PC model they offered. As part of his research, the SEO manager went to the Web to see how their customers (people who had bought this particular model) were referring to this product.
Surprisingly, he saw that many had converted this PC to run and store all of their home entertainment media. This was a new application for that model and one he was not even aware of until he looked at the “voice of the customer” to understand how his target audience was referring to this product. Immediately, he took this information to help craft the product page to incorporate keywords like [PC media center], which allowed him to target a new type of searcher for that product.
Keyword Suggestions For Video
Video can boost your listings, increase engagement and improve conversion rates. Enterprise organizations can tell consumers what they want to know about their products in real time and in the most engaging, informative manner through video. Not only that, video results are effective in the SERPs because they include thumbnails that grab search real estate and attract eyeballs.
- Embed relevant product information in the video so search crawlers understand what the video is about.
- Provide the video with a descriptive title in accordance with the H1 title of that webpage.
- Add video metadata such as video length, video dimensions, video thumbnail and video transcript (text of the video).
- Add keywords to the video that correspond to the keywords of the webpage.
- Create videos on all your major products to increase the chances of being found online.
- Target long-tail keywords that generate significantly more traffic and a very targeted audience.
- Create a video sitemap describing all the videos embedded in the site to help Google discover and index each video.
- Videos embedded on the site should have SEO-friendly, clean URLs including the video format file extension relevant to the video (i.e., .FLV, .WMV and .AVI).
If your goal is to create a video on a specific subject, you need to focus on YouTube suggestions for keyword discovery rather than Google’s Keyword Tool.
Consistency In Messaging
You also have the ability to focus on your company’s Twitter and Facebook feeds, which can be helpful to ensure a consistent marketing message for your company across both webpage (SEO) and social channels.
Again, as SEO and social come together, having consistency in the content of your marketing message is crucial.
Page Mapping
A page-based SEO approach rather than a keyword-driven approach is frequently used to target the most appropriate keywords in your important pages.
The page-based approach requires analysis of all the SEO factors affecting the rank of a page for targeted keywords, and then optimizing those factors.
Focusing on page-based keyword optimization can help your most important pages be quickly and easily found. Identifying the right keywords is the first step; and then, matching those keywords to the URL of your most important pages is the next step in this process.
- You must be able to run audits of the pages on your site to help suggest which URL’s (pages) are candidates to be optimized for each newly discovered keyword.
- You also must be able to call out the need when content is light, and new content creation is necessary.
Content Inspiration
The SEO process today is still focused on keywords and pages, but also entails more, especially as we begin to focus more on Content Marketing. SEO managers should be thinking pre-production, and they need to be a part of the content creation process to inject SEO techniques into the marketing and website strategy before and during the creation of the content.
This process will help to call out new content creation ideas and identify where content gaps exist. In his recent article Co-Citation and Co-Occurrence – The Next Big Thing In SEO, Haris Bacic stated, and I concur…
“…co-occurrence does not associate two sites altogether. Instead, co-occurrence refers to the association of some particular phrases – or more specifically, important keywords – that come in close proximity to each other. This close proximity of important keywords develops an association and relation that are understandable by Google as an important search engine factor.”
Creating quality content worth mentioning on the Web — content with socially redeeming value — is an important asset moving forward.
Marketing Department Input
Allowing Paid Search marketers, social marketers, product owners, offline marketers and merchandisers to see your keyword data and provide input will strengthen your marketing message consistency and helps provide quantifiable metrics suggesting what terms or concepts should be focused on the most, given consumer/end user demand. Your most important quantifiable metric is going to be query volume, which comes from the Google Keyword Tool.
Most keyword tracking software tools offer this metric, and it acts as an indicator of content demand and needs. Software running content audit checks and scoring them to show how “relevant” that page is in terms of SEO against a targeted keyword is another valuable, quantifiable metric.
Elements of Keyword Research
There are three main elements to pay attention to when conducting keyword research.
1. Relevance
Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers’ needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?
2. Authority
Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, information content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks. If you’re not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword’s SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can’t compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional.
3. Volume
You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. Kind of like setting up shop in a ghost town.
Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.
Benefits of Keyword Research
Marketing Trend Insight
Conducting effective keyword research can provide you with insights into current marketing trends, and help you center your content on relevant topics and keywords your audience is in search of.
Traffic Growth
When you identify the best fitting keywords for the content you publish, the higher you’ll rank in search engine results — the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.
Customer Acquisition
If your business has content that other business professionals are looking for, you can meet their needs and provide them with a call to action that will lead them into the buyer journey from the awareness stage to the point of purchase.
By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that most people in your audience want answers to.
Keywords vs. Topics
More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years, and how unimportant keywords themselves have become to our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.
And to some extent, this is true, but in the eyes of an SEO professional it’s a different approach. Rather, it’s the intent behind that keyword, and whether or not a piece of content solves for that intent (we’ll talk more about intent in just a minute).
But that doesn’t mean keyword research is an outdated process. Let me explain:
Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics — by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.
And You’ve Got the Right Keywords for Your Website SEO
You now have a list of keywords that’ll help you focus on the right topics for your business, and get you some short-term and long-term gains.
Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every few months — once a quarter is a good benchmark, but some businesses like to do it even more often than that. As you gain even more authority in the SERPs, you’ll find that you can add more and more keywords to your lists to tackle as you work on maintaining your current presence, and then growing in new areas on top of that.
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