Hate keywords? You’re not alone. To the uninitiated, SEO keywords can feel like using someone else’s words, pigeon-holed by terms you don’t want your brand associated with, or something akin to advertising. Before you write them off, ask yourself:
Would you rather?
Sell your priceless wares in Times Square (or Eiffel Tower, Banzai Pipeline, any other place your audience loves) with the attention of millions who genuinely want what you’re selling?
Or…
Sell your beloved products on the digital equivalent of CSPAN at 3am after the House has adjourned for the holidays? (crickets)
This, our friends, is the difference between intelligently employing keywords for your content and not. There are real people typing those words into their favorite search engine. The choice to reach them (or not) is yours.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is complex work that combines a unique expertise, analytical skills and good hunches as to how a particular brand can answer searcher’s needs. If it weren’t hard enough, a lot of people in marketing organizations where SEO teams sit can make it harder for them to do their jobs. By now, all marketers and executives agree search is important and even though they don’t quite understand it, they can’t help themselves from resisting search’s value.
Why keywords are important
A customer-centric approach changes keywords into keyholes where we can peek into the customer’s mind to understand what their problem, need or concern is. We can peek into their intent to see if they’re in the early stages of learning or ready to buy. We can peek into how they describe their needs.
How much would we spend on market research to know what is right there in the keywords? How can we expound on the importance of “voice of the customer” and not acknowledge how they speak?
Optimizing for keywords also helps your other marketing channels too. According to a study conducted at Stanford (Stanford, Yahoo! Labs, n.d.), users exposed to a display ad conduct 5% to 25% more campaign relevant searches. If your page is visible, you can capture some of these clicks. More bang for your marketing buck.
How do keywords work?
As marketers, we all know the importance of being discoverable on search engines and often see keywords as an obstacle to overcome. With a sigh and an extra cup of coffee, we sit with our analytics dashboards and keyword research tools and set out to play the search engine game and game the search engines. (Good luck with that last part. Google updated their core algorithm again in May 2020.)
The “keywords” you’re trying to target are essentially “queries” a person enters into a search engine. Think of keywords as your audience telling you exactly what they want to learn, do, try, buy, get help, etc. However, (and this is important) you have to deliver the most relevant and helpful answer in order to be made visible to others asking the same question.
Search engines crawl web pages to read the on-page content and the technical signals, then store and organize what it found during the crawling process. Search engines use these signals (and others like link quality, user engagement, and page load time) in a proprietary algorithm to determine which pages best answer the query someone typed into the search engine. Search engines strive to provide the most relevant and helpful answers to a searcher’s queries. If you don’t use keywords in your copy, URL, or in links pointing to your page then you are less likely to be considered relevant or helpful for that query.
What keywords should I use?
SEO helps more people find you. But before you start looking for keywords, figure out:
- What you want to accomplish
- Who your customers are
- What are your customers’ goals
This will most likely spark some keyword ideas in your mind.
Once you know who you want to reach and what they care about, it’s time to find keywords. You can use the Keyword Planner in Google Ads (yes, you do need to add a credit card, but the use of the tools is free) to get more ideas, see how competitive terms are and roughly how many people are searching per month. You can also use Google Trends (free, no credit card needed) to search phrase by phrase and compare data with location, time, and other useful filters. We’re fans of Ubersuggest from Neil Patel (there is a freemium version, paid version, and Chrome extension that is lovely) and AnswerThePublic (ignore the weird dude smiling and nodding) for additional views into keywords.
Pick a phrase or two that best represents your page and then actually search for that term you feel you have the best “answer” for. Of the search engine results for that page, ask yourself if your business belongs there. If a consumer searched that term and landed on your page, would they be happy? Be brutally honest with yourself because that’s how Google will assess your content. Once you finalize on a term, it’s time to start writing.
When you try to write copy with keywords it can be awkward. As brand experts, we all chafe a little at having to change how we want to communicate about our products. But that is the very brand-centric response to marketing that hurts a brand and hinders its ability to reach new customers and increase revenue. We can help.
Keywords Open Up Doors
Once we know what our potential customers need, we can do all the wonderful, creative things that marketers do. We can create helpful content that answers their questions, educate them regarding their concerns, and sell products that meet their immediate and long-term needs. We stop being marketers “promoting” our brand, and start being people advocating for the customers we want to serve. Straight up: What’s better for the customer is better for the brand, and the bottom line.
