Keyword Research

Keyword research is a very important part of any digital strategy. You have to know what you customers will be searching for when they are looking online for a product or service. The terms people will use to search are based on what they need and not necessarily what you would call the product.

This week in work I was working on a blog post for suggested Christmas gifts for men, as I began to fill in the keywords associated with post I realised that people searching in Ireland might also look for ‘xmas presents’  as well as ‘christmas gifts’.

The Google Keyword tool will help you with this research. You can select to research in a certain location and the tool will give you global and local monthly searches for the keyword. This is very helpful in my case where I want to specifically target Ireland as a market but also know I have customers in international markets searching for our products.

You will need to know the terms people will be searching when looking for your products for your SEO, PPC, Blog Posts, Newsletter and Social media content.

Search as an Online Marketing Format

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most popular formats of online marketing. SEO is also known as Organic or Natural marketing. SEO is when the articles on a webpage are optimised with the relevant keywords and meta tags relevant to the subject of the website. It takes time to implement and to take effect but as part of a long term strategy SEO is very important to a website.

Keyword research is ‘key’ to SEO. You have to know your customer and think how they will try and search something. For example our customers might see a golfer wearing one of our shirts- the colour of the shirt will be one of our fancy colour names like ‘baltic’, ‘sweetpea’ or ‘daffodil’ but what the customer will search are ‘blue’, ‘purple’ or ‘yellow’ and these are the words I should have in my meta keywords in the back-end of the site.

PPC- Pay per Click is a type of advertising offered by search engines. PPC ads are shown in the top three slots and right-side slots of the Search Result Page (SRP).  A brand may use PPC to create general brand awareness and drive traffic to the website- perhaps before their SEO has taken effect or if they have an ongoing campaign.

The position your ad will appear in is based on the CPC, cost per click, you are willing to pay and your Quality Score. Your Quality Score is determined by Google based on your keyword  and landing page content relevance to what the user has searched for and your click through rate for your ad. These combined factors will determine where you rank on the SRP.

Using a system with the quality score seems like a catch 22 but the main aim is to make sure brands create ads which people will want to click on.

Mobile – Mobile search has become increasingly important as more and more users are searching on their mobiles. Mobile specific ads include ‘click to call’ and ‘click to download’ ads. Click to call ads will include the phone number of the business advertising- this way the user doesn’t have to click through the ad to contact the business, they can just call directly. This is useful for businesses such as insurance companies where the customer will have to call them to process a request. The click to download ad would be used by brands who have Apps they want people to download- the customer can download directly with fewer steps to go though.