Why Every Digital Marketing Campaign Should be Underpinned by Keyword Research

The Importance of Keyword Research for Digital Marketing

You want more traffic to your website, but you don’t want any traffic, you want traffic that’s going to lead to conversions. The only way you’re going to know exactly what people are searching for is by undertaking keyword research and market analysis. This applies to both SEO and PPC – but why is it so important?

Competitiveness of Keywords

For your SEO or PPC strategy, you need to identify how competitive each term is. This will allow you to see how hard a keyword will be to rank for and also how expensive a keyword may be on PPC. Different industries have different cost per clicks associated to them. One example of this, is for a company in Cornwall who we are currently managing an SEO campaign for. Being a Cornwall attraction, they want to drive potential visitors to their website to generate footfall to their attraction. In our initial meeting, they said they wanted to rank for ‘things to do in Cornwall’ and that was it. After carrying out keyword research, we identified long tail keywords which still had high search volume to drive traffic to the website. however, they were much easier to rank for. Alternative keywords included ‘things to do in the rain in Cornwall’ ‘things to do with kids in cornwall’ and ‘things to do with dogs in cornwall’. After one month of the campaign, the website had gone from ranking 100+ for such keywords to appearing on the second page. This was through generating fresh and engaging content that answered the questions these people were typing into Google. By ranking for these keywords are pushing up rankings for the generic keyword ‘things to do in cornwall’ whilst delivering results in the process.

Seasonality

Does your business have seasonality? If so, you should be phasing your campaign throughout the year, especially on PPC to generate the best return on investment. This may also not necessarily be to upweight budgets in busy months, your campaign should be a lot more strategic than this. If your website generate a lot of traffic in your peak seasons, why not upweight budgets into seasons where you know you’re going to be quieter. For example, the Cornwall attraction will upweight budgets into ‘shoulder periods’ where they are naturally quiet due to generating enough revenue in the summer months and already being near to full capacity.

Other businesses will want to capitalise on the busier months if they desire more revenue and enquiries within these periods of the year.

PPC vs SEO Keyword Strategy

A piece of keyword research should identify the keywords you want to rank for organically vs the keywords you’re willing to invest budget into. For example, if a bunch of your keywords have high cost-per-clicks associated, you may put emphasis on these in your organic campaign so you don’t have to pay that high price for each visitor to come to your website. You’ll also want to consider high intent keywords vs informative keywords. High intent keywords are great for PPC to generate that high ROI that you require from the campaign. Informative keywords are great for SEO to surface for with a blog or a content page on your website so you aren’t paying each time these people who are lower down the decision making process to visit your website.

If you’d like keyword research for your business, or if you’d like help creating a PPC/SEO strategy, get in touch with us today!