Posted on June 12, 2017 by admin

The 6 Best Growth Hacks to Get Your Keyword Research Right

keyword Research

If it is said that it all begins with Keyword research, it is not an exaggeration. Whether you plan on running an AdWords campaign or want to dive into full-fledged organic optimization, the right keyword research can make you or break you.

Keyword research has a huge impact on not just what you are trying to rank for, but it also determines what you are going to get from that ranking. Are you going to get any traffic? Are you going to get lots of traffic, but no lead? Or are you going to get ripe, ready to convert customers?

Not so surprisingly, the internet is full of guides on how to do keyword research, and most of them are good. But, the focus of most of these guides is ‘keywords’ rather than ‘keyword research’. So, here I want to explain how it made all the difference in traffic when we aligned our keyword research with our goals for Los Angeles SEO company.

What Does Keyword Research Accomplish?

The Keyword research does not mean long lists of short tail and long tail keywords. Or simply, just the figures telling us how many people are searching for a relevant query.

The Keywords research gives you an opportunity to get into the head of your audience and understand what they want to know. Once you understand what your audience want to know, you can decide to offer them the relevant information.

Here are six tips to fast forward growth hacking process with right keyword research.

#1- There are keyword types without tails.

There are three types of keywords based on how far the customer lands on the sales funnel. These keyword types belong to different stages of the conversion funnel. So, while the long tails are important, you should also know how far your customer is from the sale.

Top of Funnel Keywords: This keywords are informational in nature for example how to, guide to, and ways to… A person searching for such keywords is looking for information.

Middle of Funnel Keywords: These keywords indicate that the visitor is seeking the best solution to the problem and has traveled the sale funnel a bit far the sale funnel e.g. best way to, how to fix, best tips to, that works)

Bottom of Funnel Keywords: These keywords indicate a purchase intent, and you know that the audience is looking to purchase/subscribe. For example, best, compare prices, how to get, how to order, nearest and so on.

When you are selecting the keywords to target, separate them based on these three types. When you are preparing the content or making on-page changes, think regarding what your audience expect to find landing on this page based on the keyword type.

 

#2- Find Your Keyword Type

Can you search for ingredients or a recipe without knowing what dish you are going to cook?

Every project, every business, and every website are unique. It is important to know what outcome do you want to have? What are your goals? Knowing your goals help to find the keyword type.

Do you want your customers to land with a mature purchase intent? Or do you want them to land with an informational intent and then lead them to the bottom of the funnel?

Do you want to drive one-time customers or do you want to drive customer engagement?

What do want to get from your campaign? What are your goals? When you find answers to these questions, you know what should the keywords get you.

Which keyword type you should focus also depends on the budget and project size. You can create a keyword trail to know what exactly do you want to do with your customers.

For example, if you are targeting a top-of-funnel keyword like compare prices, what do you want your prospect to do next? Do you want to lead him to ‘buy this’? Or you want to take him to ‘how to use’ page next.

Once you have a keyword trail, you will need to adjust your pages and content accordingly to lead your visitor to the desired action.

#3- Set Real Goals

So far, I have been trying to tie the keyword research with goals. It is no different than that but with more force.

What do you want to rank for? What is the outcome of ranking? Even though it may seem appropriate to say ‘to get traffic’, it is not fruitful. What do you want to get from traffic? How would a business benefit if x number of people start visiting the website? The real goals are about benefit i.e. return on investment and revenue.

So, while doing your keyword research, you should set real revenue and ROI goals for the keyword ranking instead of talking about visitors.

For example, as Los Angeles SEO Experts, we understand that our customer wants to know what is in there for them. If they are going to spend $1 on keywords, how much are they going to get back?

So, set some real revenue and conversion targets along with traffic goals. Know about your current status on these goals and then make a plan to improve it.

#4- Know the Competition

If you want to beat the competition, you should know the competition. When you decide your type of keywords and may be your set of keywords, search for the competition.

Depending on the project budget and your current status, you can find the competition and set milestones to drive them off.

For example, if you are a new website, your first aim should not be a three-year-old website with the highest ranking and with the most solid traffic number.

Instead, it should be a competition that came few months ahead of you, and it is still trying to find its space in the huge internet world. With Internet tools, you can prepare a log of your closest and the farthest competition along with their visitors and then work on eliminating them one at a time.

#5- Follow the SEO trail

If you want to beat the competition, you should know the competition. You should know what makes them great and then adopt a strategy to strike them off.

For this, following your competition’s SEO trail is a time-tested technique. Your competition has been through ups and downs, highs and pitfalls and you can use all this knowledge to your benefit.

You can avoid the pitfalls, and you can maximise on the growth hacks.

You can also see which keywords yield the maximum traffic and how site changes have affected the traffic.

Study the competitor’s backlink structure, URLs, on-page optimization. By researching the backlink structure, you would know which websites lead a maximum number of visitors and which other guest posting websites are good for none.

Once you have sliced opened their SEO strategy, you can start working one of your own. Take the best pieces from their strategy and assemble them in a unique, tailor-made one that fits your need.

 

#6- Time to Get to Work

By now, you

  • Understand what your audience is looking for.
  • Understand how far they are in the sales funnel.
  • Have set your goals.
  • Have a focused keyword type.
  • Have found the competitors.
  • Have reversed engineered competitor’s SEO strategy.

Now, it is time to put all the ingredients together and cook up your rankings. You can start optimizing the on-site pages or can build some back links. Or you can focus on content optimization and write the killer content.

With so much right information in your hand, you are entering the SEO world informed and ready to take the world.

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