The #1 Digital Marketing Strategy Every Business Needs: Keyword-Rich Content

Building a digital marketing strategy that drives awareness, traffic, leads and sales for your business can be an overwhelming task if you don’t know where to start. Between website design, search engine optimization, social media, email, digital advertising, and all the other elements involved in a comprehensive digital marketing plan, many marketers struggle to develop an integrated strategy.

While it’s tempting to jump right in and create a new landing page, email template or social media post, the most important first step is to focus on the right keywords.

Keyword Research

Developing keyword-rich content can improve all aspects of your online marketing efforts, but the first step is to identify the ideal keywords for your business to target.  Since an important goal of digital marketing is to help your business be found online, your digital marketing team needs to first understand the keywords that are used to find products and services that your business offers.

An effective keyword strategy starts by developing an initial list of keywords that are believed to be most important to the business. These should be keywords that accurately describe products or services and should be ideal terms for the business to show up for in a Google Search. Once this “seed list” is complete, various tools can be used to find similar related keywords, and to determine how often each of these variations is actually searched. Discoveries will be made during this process that will reveal certain words and phrases that are used far more often than others. Your digital marketing team should be focused on the keywords that are both relevant to your business and have high search volume. Savvy digital marketers can also investigate the keywords that their competitors are targeting to ensure they are maintaining a digital presence alongside their competition. This keyword research process will guide the strategy of keyword-rich content that your digital marketing team should develop moving forward.

Keyword-Rich Content

Once you have identified the keywords that your target audience uses most, it is time to start developing content around these terms. By including these keywords in your content (website pages, ad copy, emails, blogs, etc.) you will have better success capturing your audience through both paid and organic channels.

How Keyword-Rich Content Helps Organic (Unpaid) Digital Marketing

Keyword-rich content will arguably make the largest impact on your website’s search engine optimization. This is extremely valuable, as organic visits that come from search engines like Google are free! When you include the keywords that are searched most often in your content, your website is more likely to appear on the first page of Google when users are searching using these words. It is important to apply your keyword research to optimizing the HTML tags on each web page as well, but as Google has evolved over the years, helpful and informative keyword-rich content has become the most important ranking factor. Write content that addresses the benefits of your products and services while using the keywords that are searched most often to help users find your website easily in search results.

Including the right keywords in other organic (unpaid) digital marketing efforts will improve results in these channels as well. Using the right keywords in your social media posts and making use of corresponding hashtags will help maximize your reach to your target audience. Similarly, writing compelling email subject lines and copy will be much easier with an understanding of the terminology your audience uses most often. A focus on keyword-rich content will certainly improve your unpaid efforts such as SEO, social media, and email marketing, while also providing direction for your paid digital advertising as well.

How Keyword-Rich Content Helps Paid Digital Advertising

Keyword-rich content is imperative for running a successful digital advertising campaign. Traffic from the organic search results in Google are free, but the first four positions of Google search results pages are reserved for Google Ads. If you are running a Google ads campaign and your landing pages and ad copy do not include keyword-rich content, you will likely need to pay a higher cost per click than other advertisers who are using keyword-rich content. Ad position is determined by Quality Score, which factors in the number of keywords that you are using in your ads and on your landing pages. If you want your Google Ads to appear at the top of the first page for a low CPC, keyword-rich ads and landing pages are a must. Aside from helping your ads comply with Google’s Ad Rank algorithm, keyword-rich content will simply connect with your audience better. When users see the keywords that they are searching for in your ads and landing pages, they are more likely to click and convert. This same concept applies to social media advertising as well.

Social media advertising is largely based on keyword targeting in the same way that Google is. One of the best ways to show ads to your target audience on social media is to target the keywords and hashtags that they are using in their posts. If you can serve an ad that includes keyword-rich content relevant to the conversations that these users are already having, your chances of capturing their interest are much higher than serving a generic ad without any keyword strategy behind it. On social media, keywords matter, and using the right keywords in your targeting and messaging can be the difference between success and failure.

Attract Visitors With Keyword-Rich Content, Then Convert Them

Once target keywords are identified and keyword-rich content has been developed, your paid and organic digital marketing efforts will be in a better position to drive visits to your website. Driving visits and awareness may be enough for some businesses, but most digital marketing teams are focused on driving leads and sales as well. In order to move users from visitors to leads, the next step is to capture their contact information. Learn all about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), the second strategy every digital marketing team must focus on, in our upcoming blog, “How To Turn Visitors Into Leads With Conversion Rate Optimization”