Doing thorough keyword research and analysis is the foundation of a good strategy, no matter your objective, as it offers you insights that are vital to success.
Additionally, doing your keyword groundwork can help you make leeway in answering the age-old question:
What do my consumers want? Let’s get into how you can choose the right keyword for your brand:
Choosing keywords for brand tracking
If you are putting in the work to create a buzz around your brand via ad campaigns or social media marketing efforts, how do you know if it's working? With
brand tracking, of course!
Brand tracking makes it easier to know how you are being perceived by your audience; it refers to tracking keywords used in the conversations relating to your business.
Tracking the right keywords is the ‘key’ to effective brand monitoring, as it gives you insight into the terms people associate with your brand.
You need to be tracking:
Brand-related keywords
Tracking your company’s name is a simple and critical place to start, but it is just as important to track any terms that may be associated with your brand. This will help you to gain a more holistic view of how consumers perceive your business.
Secondly, it is important to factor in any common misspellings of your company’s or brand’s name — or variations thereof. This will ensure that you don’t miss any coverage.
Lastly, ensure that you include any slogans or hashtags in your keyword list. For example, if your brand is McDonald’s, you should be tracking ‘I’m loving it.’
Product-related keywords
If your business is one with a large product catalogue, you must track product-related keywords. This will give you insight into what consumers are saying about your products or services.
An example of this could be Apple, a large business with multiple offerings from Apple Pay to iPhones.
As they have multiple commodities, they would need to track them
all to get a comprehensive idea of how their products are perceived by the public.
Campaign-related keyword
If you are running any sort of campaign, be it a social media campaign or a special promotion, you must track related keywords.
Why? Well, because you want to know what your audience thinks about it, of course!
The insight you get from tracking campaign-related keywords will help you know whether your campaign was a hit or a miss, and possibly give you an idea of how you can improve going forward.
Competitor-related keywords
Lastly, it is
crucial that you know what your competitors are up to — and what better way to do so than by tracking competitor related keywords?
Your competitor related keywords should include:
- the names of your main competitors
- your competitor’s product names
- competitor campaigns, and
- competitor hashtags
Tracking keywords relating to your greatest contender will help you to keep tabs on what they’re doing and whether they’re doing it
well. This insight can help you identify holes where you could be lacking and where your brand is doing a good job.
Choosing keywords for SEO
In the context of SEO optimisation, keyword research is analysing search terms that people enter into search engines, like Google.
Doing keyword research is important because it gives you a clearer understanding of the queries your target audience has. Knowing this can help you put together a more informed and concise content strategy.
When beginning your keyword research, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- What sort of content is my audience searching for?
- How many people are looking for this information?
- Which keywords will drive the most traffic to my site?
- What are important or relevant topics relating to my business?
Now, you need to make a list of topics you want to rank, based on these questions. These can be broader terms that help you come up with more specific keywords later.
Once you have a list of general keywords relating to your brand, you need to measure their
monthly search volume. This essentially is how many times this word is being entered into Google. This insight helps you uncover which topics are most important to your audience.
You can easily determine the strength of these terms by using an application, like
Keyword Tool.
The next step is to beef your list up with keyword phrases. These are specific terms that you think your audience may be searching for
and terms you think are important to rank in the search engine results pages.
The most important thing to do during this stage of keyword research is to put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. Try and understand how they think.
Additionally, you need to add keywords to your list that your website is
currently getting found for. You can use Google Analytics to sift through your brand’s website traffic and organic search traffic to uncover which terms users are typing into search engines to get to your site.
As all keywords can have different meanings depending on the context they are being searched in, you could try typing your list of keywords into search engines yourself. This will help you form a clearer understanding of what the
user’s intent was behind the word.
The last step in SEO keyword research is to tie up any loose ends. You have your list and you’ve done your research to determine user intent —now you need to search for related terms.
This can easily be done by looking into the ‘related searches’ at the bottom of the page when searching on Google.
This could alert you to any terms you may have missed, allowing you to leave no stone unturned in your keyword research.