With the constant algoritm changes made by Google, it is clear that businesses shouldn't rely on SEO alone to earn from their websites. They need to revamp their strategies by branching out to sustainable and low-cost tactics to generate online lead and customers .
Content marketing fits the description of being an long-term and affordable strategy to reach your website goals. Through the creation of expectional and unique content on different platforms (blog, social media, splash pages, etc.) you bring your target audience down your sales funnel.
But content marketing by itself will not be as effective without the right keywords.
By choosing keywords related to your niche that will guide you in creating a content marketing strategy, you can expect to achieve higher search result rankings for your site!
Here's a quick guide on how to conduct a keyword research strategy with content marketing in mind.
Sort through your different types of keywords
Using Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and Keyword.io, you will come up with different keywords related to your niche. For more keyword suggestion, AuthorityMetrics aims to provide you with profitable keywords for your niche market.
The challenge now is to categorize each of those keywords according to type, in which there are four - commercial, transactional, informational, and navigational. Read this post at SEMrush to learn more about each.
Form content strategy
By identifying your keywords using these types, you will be able to determine the keywords that you need to optimize for specific types of content.
For instance, your landing page should optimize for transactional keywords, blog posts for informational and commercial keywords, and so on.
But before assigning the keywords to your content, determine first how you intend to use your content mix, i.e. is your blog intended to only inform your readers and not sell them your products or services?
This is achieved by forming your content strategy. All of your content activity will rest on what you write here. For help in developing a comprehensive documentation that covers your website objectives, buyer persona, competitors, and content types, refer to this post of resources at Content Marketing Institute.
Develop editorial calendar
For your blog and social media, you should pile up the posts you will be writing for the next couple of months and space them out evenly in your editorial calendar. Don't cram up your content too close to each other in your calendar. There is no exact science when it comes to how many times you should publish a post, but as long as you have a post every week, you should be good.
This will also give you time to write and publish newsjacking and holiday posts. If you see opportunities for your business to take advantage of specific holidays by way of blog posts , give them a space on your calendar.
Both content themes are not guided by keywords, but are time-sensitive so you can leverage that to your advantage.
Each post in your calendar should cater to specific keywords. Joost de Valk and Brian Dean encourages bloggers and site owner to optimize for a single keyword on each site page.
There is no absolute rule on how many keywords you should optimize for. You can even try optimizing for a keyword phrase plus long tail keywords related to the first phrase and see if that works better for you.
By following these advice, you can seamlessly integrate your keyword research with your content marketing efforts for a winning formula.