How Keywords Bring You Customers-2020

How Keywords Bring You Customers-2020

Like hashtags, keywords help a computer’s brain (the algorithm) to understand what a piece of content is about. In the case of search engines, what a webpage is about. If you get it right, your web page will perform better than your competitors on search engines. Potential customers will find you first.

This week’s blog will explore what keywords are, why they are so important to get more website traffic, and how businesses can optimise keywords to get better ranking in search engine results.

What is a Keyword?

According to Google, a Keyword is a word or concept of great significance. It can also be a word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document. This second definition is exactly how keywords work in digital marketing. It is a term that has skyrocketed in relevance in the age of the internet, with the number of mentions in literature increasing as you can see in the timeline below.




When a person searches for something on Google or another search engine, they will type or speak certain words or phrases to guide their search. These are the keywords.

Choosing the right keywords to use in your marketing copy and search engine optimisation is key to more people finding your website amongst the millions of alternatives. Achieving a higher-ranking result means you will be higher on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), and therefore have more people visit your website and a higher potential for income.

The first thing to keep in mind with keywords is that a local search via Google has become commonplace in the age of the digital phone. Search keywords should be optimised for voice search, for people who want to find a café on the go for example.

“The value of a web page’s content to users is inspected by Search Engines using several complex algorithms. Search Engines achieve this by making use of crawlers to identify keywords in the natural readable content of a web page” (Ramos & Cota, 2004)

How search engines use keywords

In technical speak, search engines are “programs that offer users interaction with the internet through a front end, where users can specify search terms or make successive selections from relevant directories. The SE will then compare the search term against an index file, which contains web page content. Any matches found are returned to the user via the front end” (Weideman, 2004).

In other words, a user of a search engine provider such as Google types in some keywords about a topic of interest; and the search engine brain (algorithm) analyses this search query, giving what it considers as the most relevant results based on the keywords.

Websites are giving rankings on individual keywords. For example, you might come up on the first page for digital marketing strategy, but the fourth page of results for social media marketing. This can be based on link popularity (quality and quantity of links), click-through popularity (how many people visit the site), as well as other factors such as keyword density. Google often changes its algorithm and are tight-lipped about exactly how it works. In any case, keywords are very important to get your content found.

“During this process of determining which web pages are most relevant, the SE selects a set of pages which contain some or all of the query terms, and then calculates a score for every web page. This list is then sorted by the score obtained and returned to the end-user” (Zuze & Weideman, 2013)

An extremely high majority of people (something like 80–90 per cent) choose a website that ranks in the first page of results. Out of millions of results, people choose one of the first five or so options by default. Therefore, optimising your search engine result (SEO) is of the utmost importance for customers to find your website.

Keywords and SEO

SEO is a common digital marketing strategy that businesses pay a lot of money for but can do a lot of the work themselves. It is a process of enhancing the ‘searchability’ of a website by optimising your web pages for better ranking in search results pages (SERPs). Search engines crawlers’ sort through the content and use keywords to help identify the most relevant content for a search query, and how a page should rank for that term.

Both on-page and off-page elements of a web site are altered to try and increase the ranking. Keyword usage is one of the most important on-page elements for SEO. Essentially, the higher the frequency of a keyword the better the chance being deemed relevant to that web page.

Choosing your keywords

Take the time to research keywords. It can really make a difference in the quality of your keywords. Keep in mind that you need to think like somebody searching on Google for a business like yours, or information. The keywords should be relevant to your brand positioning, terms easily integrated into your content and copy.

Write a list of potential keywords. First, brainstorm the terms that you think your potential customers might be searching for. Think like your target audience. If you were searching on Google for a business such as your own, what words or phrases would you search for? Write down all your ideas. Using a marketing business as an example, these are some terms you might think of:

· Marketing business

· Marketing consultants near me

· Marketing in Hamilton

· Marketing companies

These are a good start, but they only focus on the core term of Marketing. Other related terms may be:

· Website SEO

· Find more customers

· Social media advertising

· Creating sales funnels

You can expand on each of these, with similar examples for each one. Such as “Social media advertising near me”. If your office has a receptionist who takes customer calls, she will know what sort of inquires you get. Social media hashtags are another way to see what terms people are using, as they work in a comparable way to keywords.

Go into as much depth as you can with this brainstorming process. Create an excel file to use for your keywords to help manage and analyse them, and your data also becomes easily exported. It is valuable to analyse and compare the volume of searches, cost per click and competition for each keyword, so you can be more strategic in your choices. All this information is available by using keyword research tools. This helps you identify how easy it is to achieve a good search position for content using those keywords (keyword difficulty) and whether you can rank at all (keyword opportunity).

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research helps you understand what search terms are most important to your business, and it also helps give direction to a content marketing strategy. Google offers several great tools you can use for free to find the best keywords for your business. First, go to the Google homepage, and type the industry you are in. For me, Marketing or Branding. The first way to find related terms is to scroll down to the bottom of the page of search results and look at the related searches. This helps you find other relevant search terms that people are looking for related to your industry.

Google Trends shows the trending search terms across the search engine. Check for relevant terms that you can use as your keywords. The tool also allows you to compare different search terms by popularity, region and other variables such as projections.

Google Analytics is another great tool to find information about what keywords are working. You can identify what keyword terms are already bringing traffic to your website. You can find what keywords are bringing people to your website already and use this as a starting point to generating new keyword terms. You can also link a Google Search Console account to give you more data about what people are searching for.

There are many other tools out there to give you valuable information such as search volume, ranking difficulty (useful for content strategy and SEO), keyword value (useful for pay per click advertising), and competition. These tools help you spy on your competition to see what is working for them in terms of keywords. Some of the better tools are:

· Ahrefs

· Google AdWords Keyword Planner

· SEMrush

· Uber Suggest

· Word Stream



Managing your keywords

If you have been brainstorming keyword terms as discussed above, and managing them in an excel document, you have a fair volume of options now. Category or topics should separate keywords to make them more manageable. For example, some of them will be more specific to your products, and others for content marketing such as “how does SEO work”.

You can now use these keywords for different purposes and put into different sections of your website and marketing content. Keywords are useful in the following areas on your website:

· The title of your page. Both in the page title and the SEO title, which may be different. This is the first point to help Google understand the relevance of a page. As well as having keywords in your title, include them in your sub-headings, section headers and the page URL.

· The meta description. If you do not have an SEO tool for your website that allows you to write a meta description, then the first 160 characters of the content will automatically come up. This describes the search engine that helps describe the webpage and could be the reason people click or not.

· Social media. Try and include the same keywords in your social media posts. Use a hashtag for your keyword terms, as they work in the same way.

· Photo captions, image file names and links. Many people leave image descriptions and alternative text blank, but these are another key place to leave keywords.

· Throughout your marketing copy, but specifically within the first couple of sentences of each page, and in the last paragraph. Your marketing copy gives you plenty of opportunities to use a range of keywords.

How many keywords should you use? Keyword density

There is a lack of agreement amongst marketing researchers as to what the perfect keyword density is, but there is agreeance that it should be under ten per cent, and the sweet spot is around four to eight keywords per 100 words of text. You want your content to be keyword-rich, but also just as readable. Avoid using some many keywords that it discourages readers. You want your website to draw people in, but you also want to keep them there.

“Unnaturally high keyword densities should be avoided, since it would probably deter human visitors. This is directly in opposition to the reason web site owners desire high rankings: to draw visitors to web pages, and keep them there.” (Zuze & Weideman, 2013)

Keyword “tails”

There are three main types of keywords: short-tail (also called the head), middle-tail (also called body) and long-tail. Businesses should use a mixture of all three types of keywords, as they each have their benefits. For example, short-tail keywords have the highest volume of search but long-tail keywords have the highest chance of a conversion.

Short-Tail Keywords

Short-tail keywords are one or two words — for example, Marketing. These keywords are broad and generic and have a high search volume. Also referred to as Seed keywords, these are the platform for your list of keywords. Sorting your list of keywords by volume will produce a good list of short-tail keywords. The rule of thumb is, the shorter the keyword, the more competition there will be. Short-tail keywords are not very targeted, so it will be an irrelevant search result for many people. The conversion rate is very, extremely low.

Middle-tail keywords

These keywords tend to consist of three to four words. An example of a middle-tail keyword would be “Digital Marketing in Hamilton”. More specific than short-tail keywords, and middle-tail keywords receive less search volume, but are more likely to convert. These keywords are moderately competitive and have more search volume than long-tail keywords.

Long-Tail Keywords

Consisting of four or more words, long-tail keywords are specific and detailed and have low search volume. An example could be “Content marketing strategy for small businesses”. These can be specifically related to your niche market and geographic location. The big advantage of these keywords is that your competition is low and the customers these keywords attract are more likely to convert as the keywords are more targeted toward their specific needs.

The danger of writing purely for SEO

As well as writing copy to be keyword-dense to help with SEO, it needs to be well-written and compelling enough to connect with your reader. Or they will leave, and your ranking will start to suffer if you have a high bounce rate (People who leave instantly instead of viewing other pages). Avoid keyword stuffing, keywords should comprise of around five to ten per cent of your total word count. Search engines will penalise anyone stuffing the same keywords numerous times into a piece of content. Have your main keyword in mind and write alternatives naturally into your content. While you want to include long-tail terms, doing so naturally is not easy when they are so specific. A short-tail keyword such as marketing strategy is far easier to include in copy than “Content Marketing Strategy in Hamilton”

“Web sites and web pages are blacklisted (Yung, 2011) and excluded from search engines’ (SE’s) indices due to “black hat” (unethical) techniques employed on them. One of these techniques is keyword stuffing: the practice of repeating important keywords on a web page to the point where the excess goes against the grain of readable English text.” (Zuze & Weideman, 2013)



Keywords and Blogging

When choosing your keywords, do not make the mistake of just choosing commercial ones. In the first stages of the buyer journey, consumers require information about their problem. Having content on social media and in blog posts that provide information are a suitable place to leave relevant keywords. ‘How does content marketing work?’, for example.

Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to use keywords strategically on your website. A good blog post will be laden with short, middle and long-tail keywords.

Keywords on YouTube

Keywords are just as important on YouTube as they are on your website. YouTube works comparably as a search engine, it gives users relevant video results to their search term. Having optimised keywords in your Channel keywords, your profile description as well as in your video keywords helps give YouTube information and context about your channel. This can help increase the visibility of your channel as your videos become more likely that they become a recommended video to other users, based on what they are watching. YouTube learns what type of content you produce and who your target audience is.



Why Your Brand Should Be On Giphy — What You Need To Know About GIF SEO

ROI (return of investment) is therefore mainly views and impressions – so although its rare they drive traffic, it is a free way of getting your brand out there for consumers to see. Because of this, more brands are jumping on the Giphy bandwagon such as our own client Missguided, and Gymshark too.

Giphy is being leveraged as a serious marketing channel – here’s how you can do this too

On Giphy – you can create and upload video content and make them into short GIFs, to then be used hopefully by millions. But first, you need to create a brand channel. This is free and easy to set up but before your GIFs can be publicly available in search, you’ll need to have a verified brand channel. To get a verified brand Giphy channel, follow this guide.

The application process is easy; you just need to prove you’re a legitimate company, have a professional website, a modest social media following, and upload 5-10 original (quality) GIFs to your account. It typically takes 2-14 days to get verified and then you’re ready to go across all platforms including social media.

How to optimize your gif content to get it to rank

The mechanics of getting your content to rank at the top is actually quite simple but competition is undeniably high.

When you upload a gif, you get asked to add # tags relevant to the content and relevant to the keywords you want to rank for. You can add a maximum of 10 tags – so choosing which to focus on first is super important here. After all, you’ve spent this time creating the gifs – let’s make sure people actually see and use them.

For example – say I’m looking for a gif that includes someone doing a “gym flex.” You can see here that Gymshark dominates this search, with their branded gif ranking no.1 amongst 6,800+ gifs to choose from. As a result – they’ve landed 857,000 views from that one GIF. You’ll also notice that it’s near impossible to find a Gymshark GIF without seeing their logo in one way or another. This is on point to really push the brand and own anything gym related when it comes to social content.




Giphy also doesn’t differentiate between compound words or phrases at this time. So single words only in search help. However, if you want to rank for a two-word phrase like “gym flex” make sure to include these tags separately (like the example above) or with a space like #gym flex.

GIF search engines also use image recognition technology to analyze GIF content to determine what the GIF is about. This is why it’s so important to make the contents of your GIF related to your target keywords.

If a GIF includes a text caption within it’s looping video clip, the GIF search engine will pick up on this information and determine that this GIF is related to whatever words are in the caption. Such as this is clear that this is a leg day post – ranks high and has therefore achieved 4.8 million views.

SO, how do you do this?

First of all, let’s not focus on ranking for your brand name. Although this is a minimum requirement – naturally, the search volume on your brand name is probably low in GIF search engines. This isn’t because your brand isn’t that exciting. It’s because most people are using GIFs in conversations, unfortunately, aren’t talking about your brand (yet).

And secondly, we need to be realistic. How easy is it going to be to rank 1 for a gif when there are over a billion other gifs to compete with?

For example, if you are a sports brand, you may not be able to get a high ranking GIF for a keyword like “sports,” as it’s a competitive keyword (281,000 results).

However, you may have a better chance of ranking for “kick up” (71,000 results) or “goal” (43,000 results).

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add your branded tags. Absolutely do this. The best practice is to add your branded keywords to every GIF you upload but focus or prioritize the low competition, high relevancy keywords first to get your content seen.

So what keywords should you be including in the tags and have a good chance at ranking for? This is where keyword research comes in.

How to get Giphy search volumes?

The short simple answer is. – you can’t (yet). Tenor (Giphy’s competitor) does offer a very topline insights section into gif search volumes – mainly showing whether that key term is within the top 100, 1000, or 10,000th searched for gif term on their site. But what you can find out is competition based on the number of results in the Giphy ‘SERPS’ and number of views for ranking 1st.

If I was a sports brand as an example “Kick Up” has 71,000 results and the most relevant no.1 result has 393,000 views. Whereas “Goal” 43,000 results, with the top-ranking gif landing 13.9 million views. Therefore you have a better chance of attempting to rank for “Goal” in this instance.

But if you like to keep it simple, rank competitiveness based on the total number of GIFs uploaded as either Low (less than 2,500), Medium (2,500 – 10,000), or High (10,000+).

We at Rise at Seven have a system which ranks the Giphy keywords you should be targeting based on competitiveness and views data.

So when will I start to see my Gif content rank?

Once you’ve uploaded the gif content and attributed the tags, the GIF search engine will begin testing out each of your GIFs in organic search results to see how they perform. It will look at views, shares, click-through rate and relevancy and will decide whether to promote or demote your GIF in search results for each keyword.

This is one form of social media optimization – it’s different across every channel!

How is Giphy tied into search?

If you’re questioning whether you should spend your valuable time and effort on optimizing GIF content – then its probably not for you (yet).

Brands that value impressions as a metric are probably going to be the ones more interested in implementing this as a strategy. As search marketers, ultimately we want to produce useful content and products that you remember the brand and come back. Giphy is part of that journey, building the brand and encouraging branded search from the beginning.

Gymshark doesn’t rank in the top 3 for “gym leggings” in Google. But their brand is that strong that last year they turned over over £176million. How? They’ve also been a social led business, with a huge brand and strong community worldwide. So for a competitive brand like that – Giphy is a key part of their strategy. The gifs add value to customers’ conversations, they make you part of emotion on social media and simply help put you at the forefront of consumer’s minds.

Don’t forget more than 10 billion GIFs are served each day.

GIFs are a brand awareness play.

GIF marketing is a growing channel with many people using it every day, but many brands not knowing how to utilise it, or utilise it well. In the next few years, we will see advancements in technology that allows further adoption of GIF and increases the value that GIFs can bring as a marketing channel. And that’s when things will get competitive.

Be ahead now. Why wait?

Let’s go!

This article was originally published on Rise at Seven, a creative SEO agency for global brands based in the UK, by Carrie Rose, the founder and creative director. They are one of the fastest-growing start-up agencies specializing in Technical SEO and how creative has a big part of search. They combine bigger and bolder content marketing and Digital PR strategies with industrial-strength technical SEO expertise to deliver more value than the biggest agencies in the world ever could. You can read the original article here.



3 Pillars Of SEO Marketing: Keywords, Content & Backlinks

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of increasing the traffic to your site in terms of quality and quantity through organic search engine results.

Google makes thousands of updates, and Google’s algorithm changes EVERY YEAR. Especially after 2011, everything has changed, and traditional marketing has vanished.

Hundreds of Bloggers are born each month with existing or different ideas and niches. But, not all succeed. They try numerous things to rank better and get organic traffic. Of course, there is no harm in experimenting, but we need to understand what are the priorities and critical factors for Google to get ranking and drive quality traffic.

In this blog, we will discuss the three best weapons for SEO, Step-by-Step. Pillar-1: Keywords

Keywords are the bridge between what people search and what you provide. Therefore, choosing the right keywords is super important.

If you select inappropriate keywords, then you will find zero traffic or very minimal traffic. It can ruin all your efforts and strategies.

So, the very first step of any content marketing for SEO is to pick the right keywords.

Before moving on to Step-2, let’s figure out the ways with which we can find the most suitable keywords for your niche.

Here, the role of SEO Tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, UberSuggest comes into the picture. If you are a startup or initial blogger, then using UberSuggest or Google Keyword Planner will be cost-effective. These tools are free and user friendly.

Let’s suppose you have an email marketing service agency, and you want to produce educational content for your email marketing campaigns.

So, your focus keyword is “email marketing.” Go to UberSuggest.Com and type the keywords.

Now you can see in the overview section, it gives you data on the monthly search volume, SEO difficulty, and Cost Per Click (CPC).

A unique feature of Ubersuggest is, it shares the backlink report of the competitors that help you compete with them and gives you the opportunity to grab their space on Google.

It also suggests you with the best keyword ideas with competition analysis, CPC, and SEO difficulty level.

When you click on the Content ideas section, it will help you by suggesting the content ideas where you can fill the content gap.

By using such tools, you exactly know how to create educational content and how to run campaigns to bring conversion.

For example, let your campaign style be, “How to do email marketing and it’s automation.” In the 2nd campaign, your content is on “Industry Reports on powerful ecosystems and ROI by email Marketing,” and 3rd content is the “case study on email marketing effectiveness about some clients.” Now you are explaining with testimonials about the ways they are making thousands and millions of dollars through email marketing.

If you create content on such keywords and run your campaign with such an informing and educational email series, then you can convert more customers and generate more hot leads.

Hence, do not choose your content keywords on a random basis. You should do in-depth research and analyze the competition and search volume.

Prefer Long-Tail Keywords over Short-Tail Keywords

To beat the competition, you should choose long-tail keywords. From the last 15 years, you must have come across short tail keywords and long-tail keywords.

Since short tail keywords are very competitive, thus, to get rank on such highly competitive keywords is very difficult, and it could be a waste of time. Hence, we can not ignore the positive impact of long-tail keywords.

Thousands of potential users search what they want to read. Long-tail keywords are low-volume keywords, but they help you rank easily on top. These keywords drive a significant amount of traffic on your site. So, take time, analyze, and search for a long-tail keyword properly.

SEMrush, Ahrefs, Serpstat, Moz, UberSuggest, and Google Keyword Planner are the SEO tools you can consider, especially for Keyword research.

Pillar-2: Content:

There is a common saying, “Content is the King in SEO,” and I think most of us must have come across this. It is not a lie. Content is the most critical and key to success.

As per the study of HubSpot, businesses that publish content regularly get 55% more visitors, 350% more traffic, and generate 67% more leads versus those companies that do not publish blog posts. Also, the study of Demand Metric shows, blog posts get 97% more inbound links and 434% increase in the indexed pages.

Even Google has confirmed, “content” is one of Google’s top 3 ranking factors.

While creating content and before publishing it, you need to take care of 3 significant factors:
Unique and Informational content related to your niche only
Blog Post Length
Keyword Optimization

Marketing study shows, only 1% of marketers create content, rest 99% consume it. And creating unique, informing, and regular content is the biggest challenge for marketers.

So, while creating content, make sure it is relevant to your niche, not copied or plagiarized so as to avoid penalties.

Next is the length of your blog post. Before 2011, creating 300-400 words content was enough to rank on Google and impress your audience. But now, it has no meaning though content length varies from industry to industry.

Marketing companies, like us, need comprehensive and informative content. In various studies by LinkedIn, Neil Patel, HubSpot, and Hootsuite, the content between 1500-3000 words performs better on search engines and brings more credibility.

For Travel and Tourism, blog posts between 1200-1500 words are good to go.

For Healthcare, Technology, Social and political news, the blog posts should be from 800-1200 words.

Keyword Optimization is also a crucial factor

At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If your list of keywords isn’t at least 100 keywords per group, go back to step 1 and keep at it.

It is easy to get 100 similar keywords that you can include in your blog post.

Also, Google-likes content with visuals (images/infographics), videos, GIFs, and others. So, you can use it to boost your SEO.

You can optimize your keywords in the URL, Title, H-1 heading, Meta Description, in the first 100 words of your blog post, and conclusion.

Once you are done with content creation and optimize it well, there are few more things that need to be taken care of before publishing your blog post. These are:
Google prefers short URLs, so keep your URLs short.
To rank higher, try to include your primary keyword in your headline.

Pillar-3: Domain Authority & Backlinks:

Now, with Keyword Research and Content creation, you win the half battle of SEO.

But the hardest part about SEO is building links. It is a part of Off-Page SEO.

No matter how much on-page SEO you do, you won’t rank well if you don’t build links.

“As per the algorithm of Google, the more you have backlinks on high authority sites, the higher will be your visibility, the higher you receive the traffic, and the more likely you will rank higher.”

Any website can improve ranking, domain rating, and its authority on Google if they have strong backlinks.

But only if there was an easy way to build links. One that didn’t require you to spend money or write tons of content.

Check the step by step simple ways of creating high-quality backlinks: Guest Posting:

There are many websites that allow you to post on their sites. These websites give you one or more do-follow links and help you in your branding by providing recognition in the bio section.

Search for those websites, reach out to them via email or directly, follow their guidelines strictly, produce high-quality original content, and get backlinks from there.

It is one of the best ways to get top DA links where you can drive traffic, rank better, and build your site’s authority.

You can be a columnist for some leading websites such as Forbes, Medium, Entrepreneur, and the like where you can contribute regularly and drive vast amounts of traffic. It will also boost your site’s Domain Authority.

Prepare Industry Reports:

With the two comprehensive reports on “17 Charts That Show Where Content Marketing Is Heading” and “New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers are Worth”, digital marketer Neil Patel made more than 90,000 backlinks.

So, you can prepare at least two in-depth industry-focused reports in a year and produce thousands (or thousands) of backlinks.

Produce Free Video Content:

Try to produce informing video content and offer your viewers for free. HubSpot generated thousands of high authority backlinks by providing free online courses and certifications. Also, it gives HubSpot a tremendous amount of organic traffic and increases its sales.

Get Social Shares by reaching out to Influencers:

Now, it’s time to utilize your social media kind of stuff. I want to take you on Twitter, where you can search for related keywords to your blog post.




Now click on their profile and get whatever the possible details such as website, email id, or anything which can help you in reaching out to them.

Start emailing them to get more social traction:

The response rate is approximately 30%, with the outreach of 90-100 emails to the influencers.

Once you make it into practice, you will start getting traction on Twitter.

It will also give you greater reach and engagement on your web.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a super important part of SEO. If you choose it rightly, it can drive massive traffic, which means more leads and conversions.

Content is not just the king but a kingdom. It can make or break any business. Your content defines your brand, feasibility, and helps to build trust in the market. If it is not informing and inspiring, all efforts are worthless.

And the toughest part is your website’s authority. Higher the backlinks, the better you will rank, and the more likely your website will drive traffic and bring sales.

So now, we have discussed all the three pillars of SEO Marketing, and it’s the criticality of keyword research, content, and backlinks.

If any marketer or blogger misses out any one of these pillars, they may lose their traffic, ranking, and, most importantly, sales and ROI.