To keep the concept simple, Inbound Marketing = Content Marketing.
Content Marketing = blogging, ebooks, white papers, free downloads, videos, all living on your business' website.
You won't be successful at all of the pieces of content marketing without a strategy to give structure and organization to the content you create. After all of the work you're putting into creating the content, you want it to result in leads to your site, and eventually sales of your services.
Your content strategy should be built on relevant keywords to your industry, and what your ideal clients are searching for. Your content will be found in search if it is built on a foundation of strong keywords.
Thank you to Shannon Evans and business.com for their insights on keywords, shared here:
It’s no secret that content is king. Digital marketers have been hearing this phrase since the dawn of the Internet—or at least since 1996 when Bill Gates wrote a paper on the subject. Eighty-three percent of B2B marketers have a content strategy. So, how can you give your content the impact and visibility it deserves? Keywords.
Keywords in Content Marketing = Findable Content
Many reasons companies invest in content marketing is because it draws customers into the sales funnel, allowing them to market and nurture prospects to the bottom of the funnel. This makes it extremely important for people to find your content. Keywords are an integral part of this. High volume keywords in your content do two things:
- Optimizes your content around topics users are actively searching for
- Gives more exposure to your content when you start ranking for those keywords
Having the right keywords is a great long-term strategy for making your content findable. Think of content marketing as adding as many doors to your website as possible. The more exposure you have in the search engines from these articles, the more potential you have for converting someone to buy.
Why are Keywords Important?
Search engines are now able to understand keywords and their synonyms. Leading to the introduction of semantic search, which has improved “search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable data-space…to generate more relevant results.” This means keywords are more important than ever. It’s not just thinking about a word or short phrase anymore — it’s the intent of the searcher behind the keywords. Why are they searching for X, Y or Z?
How Do You Know Which Keywords to Use?
Creating valuable content for your readers is priority number one. Think of questions or pain points your customer base has for your industry. What does your company do to solve these problems? For example, if you own a company that provides digital marketing consulting, you may want to write content for digital marketers. Here’s how you can discover the questions people are searching for.
Answer Core Questions About Your Business
Use information you have already researched. If you provide SEO services, what keywords are you using in that category? Incorporate those keywords into your content when answering questions about SEO.
Look at Keywords People Use to Get to your Website
It does not matter what you use in terms of website platform, you should have access to a good amount of keyword information. You can also check your Google Analytics information for your domain name. Learn how people find your site and create content around those keywords. You can look at Google trends to understand the keywords and search traffic coming from each of these keywords. For example, if someone is looking for a consultant for digital marketing, do they search for “best SEO agency” or “SEO advice”? Examine your website analytics to get this information.
Use a Keyword Planner Tool
Try Google’s Keyword Planner. You insert your company’s domain and it will provide a list of keywords related to your site and their search volume. (And if you are a HubSpot user, we are big fans of their Keyword Tool. It ranks keywords by monthly searches, and difficulty to rank organically for certain words, helping you to prioritize which keywords to focus on first.) No matter which you use, these keyword tools are a great way to get inspired and help spark ideas for content.
What Should Keywords in My Content Look Like?
While keywords are integral, don’t go overboard with them (this is called keyword stuffing and it’s a huge no-no). Pick one or two keywords to focus on and try to work it in every 100 words or so. If you only get two keywords in a 300 word article, that’s ok. Don’t force it — quality content comes first!
Your title is another place to put your keyword(s). It is one of the first things a search crawls through and mostly likely your H1 tag will be around it. Having keywords in this area will help you rank for the keyword.
We also recommend adding in your keywords to your meta description. This short description will help search engines and users understand what your content is about. If one of your keywords is included, your content will have a better chance of being seen by your target audience.
The Value of Keyword Research
Keyword research is hard work and can be quite time-consuming. However, there are a few companies that have done an excellent job figuring out how to take their content marketing to the next level by applying keywords into their strategy. They did this by answering common questions, integrating keywords, and promoting on social media and email.
If you need help understanding content marketing, read our blog. This blog can help you understand why content marketing is such a valuable asset to your B2B marketing strategy.
