Using keywords like a pro.

Improve your content by researching keywords that are relevant for your audience.

Content marketing is a key activity in your Marketing Automation campaign because all your Lead Nurturing process relies on content and that’s why you can’t take it for granted.

One of the first things before starting working with content is creating personas based on the people that interacts with your organization to create a profile and to craft the right content for them.

Both of those activities relies in understanding the clients of your company, who are the people visiting the website and how they are getting there.

Analyzing the data provided on the internet takes the personal contact from the equation, so how can we check the motivations and needs of those people without talking to them?

One good way is collecting the keywords they are using to search for something on the different search engines. In this way you can get what kind of information people need to solve a problem that are leading them to your website.

To help you start working with keywords we, at Route, decided to divide this post in two major parts.

One starting with a brief definition and different types of keywords and explaining how to find the best keywords for your business.

The other explaining how you can use it to help several aspects of your marketing strategy and Marketing Automation campaigns.

Definition of keywords

Keywords are words or phrases that people use to search for something on the web. According to Statistic Brain, in 2013 Google registered almost 6 billion searches per day.

Among the amount of keywords searched there are many that can be relevant for your business and those are the ones that you need to understand.

By doing this you will learn how are the people finding your content and visiting your website. With this information in hand you can use it for four main reasons:

1. Optimizing your site to appear in the first or second page of the SERP;
2. Crafting better PPC campaigns;
3. Improving your Marketing Automation with better content in your Lead Nurturing campaign;
4. Checking the maturity of the leads and stage in the sales funnil they’re in.

Different types of keywords

Keywords can be classified in two ways: broad keywords and long tail keywords.

Broad keywords are those words or phrases that can be applied to your industry or company, other companies in your industry or even to other industries that don’t have any relation to your business.

Long tail keywords are more specific. They tend to be longer than broad keywords and to have a closest relation to your industry and company.

Let’s use the word “lead” as an example. Lead can be a chemical element (pronounced “lēd” in this case), can be the verb “to lead” and the word to describe someone that took an action and demonstrated interest in an offer made by a company.

In digital marketing, it could be giving their name and email to download a material, for example.

So, the keyword “lead” might be used in different ways and not all of them are good for your company. It’s a broad keyword and fits different interests. But now, let’s take a look in another situation.

Someone goes to a search engine and writes: “materials made from lead”, “past tense verb to lead” and “lead generation strategies”.

In this scenario there are three different people searching for three different subjects related to the word “lead”.

If you are a marketer or a sales person working with lead generation, you’ll probably benefit attracting people that are searching using the long tail keyword “lead generation strategies”.

Finding the keywords

There are some ways to find out what keywords your visitors are using to access your website or the keywords that are important to your business and you’re not getting visitors from them because your website don’t appear on the first or second page of the SERP.

Here are some tools and search engine features that you can use:

GOOGLE SUGGEST

When you start typing keywords on Google the search engine starts giving suggestions of queries based on the highest frequency that they occur.

It’s a simple way to find out what people are looking for related to your business activity or interests.

As an example we decided to search about Marketing Automation and Google suggested us: Marketing Automation Software, Marketing Automation Tools, Marketing Automation Companies.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is an important tool to monitor the activity of a website.

While it can measure conversions it shows how the visitors are interacting with the website, what pages and content are they interested and how they arrived there.

Up until 2013 marketers could benefit from Analytics looking at the keywords from organic traffic that were leading to the website from searches made using Google.

Now most of this information is not provided and information about organic traffic keywords is limited. But, if your have AdWords campaigns it will show all the keywords used to arrive in your website.

Checking the pages and content that have more visits in your website can give you insights about the keywords that are attracting more people to your website.

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS

The Webmaster Tools allows you to analyze your website and get information about its structure and how it is interacting with Google’s search engine.

One of the features is collecting the keywords that makes your site appear on the organic search. You can also see the average position of your website and the CTR of each keyword.

It is one of the best ways to follow the keywords that are being displayed and generating traffic to your website.

You should use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools while analyzing the data of your website. Google allows users to integrate both tools and by doing this you’ll get Webmaster information within Analytics.

If you decide to do that, there are some things you need to know about how both tools define keywords according to Google:

The Keywords page in Webmaster Tools displays the most significant words Google found on your site.

The Keywords tool in Google Adwords displays the total number of user queries for that keyword across the web. Analytics uses the term “keywords” to describe both search engine queries and AdWords paid keywords.

The Webmaster Tools Search Queries page lists shows the total number of keyword search queries in which your page’s listing was seen in search results, and this is a smaller number. Also, Webmaster Tools rounds search query data to one or two significant digits.

GOOGLE TRENDS

Google Trends show the volume of searches in a period of time.

It’s interesting to check if a keyword related to your business is still relevant and being searched or it’s starting to decline.

You can also compare with other keywords to see the ones that are more popular than the others. It is possible to filter by location, time frame and business category.

In this example we searched for some activities related to Marketing Automation like Lead Nurturing, Drip Marketing, Inbound Marketing and Permission Marketing.

As you can see, Marketing Automation and Inbound Marketing are more searched than Drip Marketing, Lead Nurturing and Permission Marketing.

GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER

If you have a Google account you can use Google AdWords to use its Keyword Planner even if you don’t have any campaign running.

The Keyword Planner offers some features:

1. Finding suggestion of new keywords related to another keyword, a website address and a business category;
2. You can get statistics of keywords like volume of searches and history of searches. You can also use it to suggest groups of ads based on the keywords you’re analyzing;
3. Choose keywords and estimate the cost and clicks of a campaign;
4. Create new combinations of keywords to get new information of volume of searches and traffic estimations.

UBBERSUGGEST

This tool uses information of Google Suggest and other suggest services to give keywords ideas related to a specific search.

All the information displayed is based on real queries across search engines, news and video sites and shopping places. It works by adding a letter after the keyword the user wants to search.

For example, if the search is Marketing it will display all the suggestions for each letter of the alphabet, like this:

ROUTE

When Route starts tracking a user it gets information of how the person arrived at the website being monitored.

Those information will be displayed in the contacts session when visiting the contacts details. Route can capture UTM information (accessing _utmz cookie) like: Campaign Name, Campaign Content, Campaign Medium, Campaign Source and Campaign Term.

There are two ways that Route can track a keyword used: if you use URL builder to track your links Route will get the information you provide and if your run a PPC campaign.

Using the keywords

You can use all the information gathered in different strategies. Let’s take a look on some examples.

KEYWORDS AND OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Appearing on the first and second pages of the SERP in front of your competitors can be an advantage for your business.

Ranking in a good position in the organic search is important because it helps your company to be reached by visitors easily when they’re searching for something they need and have interest.

Knowing the important and relevant keywords for your business it will help organize the content of your website to make it attractive for Google.

The challenge here is collecting the organic data. Accessing your analytics account the organic traffic from search engines like Bing and Yahoo will be displayed and even if the traffic from those search engines is not big you can still have an ideia of the keywords people are using.

Google since last year made almost all organic searches “not provided”. As we all know Google is the number one search engine with a market share around 67% so this lack of information is pretty relevant. But, there are other ways to get this information.

Using Google Webmaster Tools you will be able to check the keywords that are generating traffic from organic results.

Once you have all the information related to the organic search and started creating content, structuring and optimizing your website based on them you likely will start displaying on the top positions of the organic results.

This will lead to more traffic and more prospects going inside your marketing and sales funnel.

KEYWORDS AND PPC CAMPAIGNS

Running PPC campaigns is a good strategy to combine with the SEO. Your company can benefit from two aspects:

1. Ranking in the first or second pages of the SERP for keywords that have a lot of competition;
2. Having one more place to be displayed for the users allowing the marketing team to direct the prospects to specific landing pages built to convert those who access it.

Working with PPC campaigns will give your organization one more channel to attract prospects to your marketing and sales funnel giving you the opportunity to interact with them aiming to convert them to leads and clients.

For the process be more efficient you need to create good campaigns and knowing what keywords are better than the others is one important step.

You can use the tools mentioned above to search for keywords that are more used, to check the quality of the keyword analyzing its CTR and if its converting your prospects.

It will be possible to know the keywords that are not relevant nor good to your business and consider them as negative keywords not allowing the search engine to display your ad whenever they’re used.

PPC campaigns are more specific and that’s why it’s interesting to use it to trigger different types of people with different needs.

Doing it requires the analysis of the right keywords to be used. Increase the quality of your traffic with well crafted ads.

KEYWORDS AND CONTENT MARKETING FOR LEAD NURTURING

By know you already noticed that keywords can be hints of what people want. Everytime they search for something they are expressing interest in that subject and probably need information to solve a problem.

To solve this problem they’ll access all of those relevants websites that appeared on the SERP and consume the content related to what they want to know.

Engaging those people will require a good content marketing strategy and an interesting way to keep those people close is by nurturing them.

If your company has a tool like Route that automates the sending of emails bases in events the visitors perform on the website, you’ll be able to track how they arrived in your website (including the keyword used in some cases), what kind of content they consume and based on their characteristics sending the right content at the right time to them.

KEYWORDS AND VISITOR PROFILE

Marketing is all about people and knowing what are their needs will give a nice advantage to your business strategy.

In the digital environment the data we collect based on the people’s behavior online and personal characteristics will help to develop a better picture of who are the ones that will be or are more interested in our service or product and have the higher probability to become a client.

Keywords play an interesting role in this analysis.

When searching for something people are saying: “I have a problem and I need a solution”. So, if someone is searcing for “lead” only it’s hard to know what’s the problem, but if someone searches for “lead generation strategy” it’s pretty clear.

That’s why it’s important to pay attention in the information about the traffic origin and the keyword used, and Route allows you to do that.

The first benefit from doing this is knowing what interested the person to get to your website. With this information plus the tracking of the user, it’s possible to start lead nurturing and scoring this person, aiming to change the person’s position in the sales funnel.

The second is about learning what keywords attract a more qualified traffic. To do this you also need to track the interactions and behavior of the visitor in your website, learning their path inside the sales funnel and the time that takes from arriving and converting as a client.

Conclusion

Exploring the keywords is like being a detective collecting clues and information to reach the right person in the end.

Along the way you will need to test everything to see if it’s relevant and change your strategy whenever you notice that your information is not relevant.

Knowing how to work with keywords will give you better insights to create personas and to create content that stands out from the competition, engages your leads and helps them to move along the sales funnel with the right lead nurturing campaign.