How to Choose Keywords for Your Blogging Strategy

It all begins with a keyword. But, do you know how to choose keywords for your blogging strategy? Keyword research is the most important aspect of search marketing, yet often can be the most confusing. Keywords are the building blocks for a successful marketing campaign, but which keywords should you use? Who is your target audience? What makes a keyword “good” and why are some keywords better or worse than others?

Keyword: A keyword is a word or phrase that someone types into a search engine to help find a website. It is how people search on the Internet to find the content that you have on your website.

• Start With Your Buyer Persona.
  It is important to know the buyer persona for your services or industry. Depending on your industry, you may even have more than one buyer persona. Look at age, gender, profession, education, financial situation, buying habits or anything else important that makes your buyer persona who they are. Use this information to build your initial keyword list meant to target that persona. Check out this article from Hubspot about how to create personas.
   
• Relevancy
  How relevant is the keyword to your website? Also, does it make sense for someone to search for this keyword and land on your site? It can be tempting to pick keywords that may seem “easy” to rank for, yet have no relevance to the actual content of your website. Don’t get tricked into using keywords that don’t really pertain to you just because they have high search volume. Always think of the user experience and ask yourself, “does this keyword help the visitor of my site, or will they just click away?” Now, more than ever, search engines reward websites for providing useful, helpful and relevant content.
   
• Traffic vs. Qualified Traffic
  It can be easy to get caught up in the traffic numbers for a certain keyword and immediately starting using that keyword in a strategy. But, how many of the people landing on your site are actually qualified web traffic? Qualified traffic means that the traffic is actually relevant to your website and could potentially turn into a real live lead. Qualified traffic is usually considered to include your buyer personas; the people you really want on your website. You could have thousands of visitors to your site, however they may immediately bounce away and be lost in cyberspace. So, would you rather have 10,000 visitors who will never convert to leads, or 1,000 visitors who are all qualified potential leads?
   
• Long Tail Keywords
  Narrow it down a little bit. Long tail keywords are much more likely to convert visitors on your site than more broad keywords. For example, thousands of people are searching for “web developer” but how useful is that really for your website traffic? Also, think of the thousands of websites that are already trying to capture or rank for that keyword. Instead, think realistically by refining and lengthening your keywords to something like “Drupal web developers in Boston” to help capture those visitors who are farther along in their conversion cycle! (And to beat out the competition...)

There are many factors to consider when choosing keywords, including keyword competition, the seasonality of the keywords, negative keywords, and much more. 

Choosing keywords doesn’t just start at blogging, but starts at the beginning of your online marketing strategy. Choosing the right keywords will help to guide your overall content strategy and the waterfall of efforts following that strategy. Remember, your keyword set list is never officially done. Marketers should constantly review and refine keyword results to guide a successful online marketing strategy.

Wondering how content marketing can boost your branding and leads? Let BI review your website and help -- with a free website marketing audit.