Small business owners have a lot on their plate.
They’re responsible for everything from sales and marketing to product development and customer service.
But one of the most important aspects of running a small business is content marketing.
To reach your target market, you need to identify the right keywords to target with your content.
This blog post will show you how to find the right keywords for your business.
We’ll also give you tips on using those keywords in your content marketing strategy.
So read on for all the info you need!
1 – Know your target audience and content pillars
Before you dive into keyword research, you need to have a clear idea about your target customer.
Until you know who you want to reach and what makes them tick, it’s impossible to devise a list of meaningful keywords.
Think about your existing customers and any common features. If you could replicate one customer, what would they look like?
With your ideal customer in mind, decide on three to five content pillars; the main themes for your content.
We often ask our clients to think about what they stand for when devising these content pillars.
Once you have these core themes in place, you can create content that supports them, all tied into relevant keywords.
2 – Check out your existing rankings and competitors
Which keywords are already performing well on your website?
Knowing your current SEO position is a great place to start before you launch into a new campaign of keyword analysis and ranking.
There are free tools you can use to check out your site, including SEOptimer and SEMrush.
While running these reports, take a moment to check out your competitors too. Which keywords are they successfully targeting with their content?
3 – Brainstorm and get suggestions
You’ve completed these foundation steps, and now it’s time to work out which keywords you want to target.
We like to think about keyword idea planning in terms of the questions our ideal customers might ask.
You can keep a list of customer questions (ask your team to keep a list, too!) and use tools like Answer The Public to generate ideas.
Extend your keyword research using the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to get more suggestions.
This free tool is handy when it comes to the next step.
4 – Sort by Unicorn status
Pop all of your potential keywords into a spreadsheet and, for each one, include the estimated monthly search volume and how competitive the keyword is.
The ‘best’ keywords to target are what we call unicorns, those with high search volume and low competition.
Sort your list of keywords based on those with the highest search volume and lowest competition, and start targeting those at the top first.
There’s nothing wrong with a keyword targeting strategy based around a long-tail of search, going after many keywords with low monthly search volume.
But a long-tail search strategy will take longer to perform and requires creating a considerable amount of content!
5 – Incorporate your chosen keywords
With your preferred keywords chosen, it’s time to create content with those keywords incorporated.
Start with 10 to 20 target keywords and brainstorm the content you can create around those terms.
We like to use Jasper.ai to generate keyword-optimised title ideas for blogs, podcasts and videos.
Remember to repurpose your pillar content into different long and short-form content to get the maximum bang for your content creation buck.
And, when creating the content, make use of the free Yoast SEO tool in WordPress to check how well optimised your blog posts are – green lights all the way!
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So, what are you waiting for? Start finding the right keywords for your business and create content that will reach your target market.
The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll see results.
Which keywords will you start targeting today?
