Perhaps the least talked about tools, keywords are the smallest component of your digital marketing structure. Not less than magical phrases, they could make or break your business based on how you capitalize upon them. While debates about paid searches taking over have started, experts have it – ‘it’s early to overlook organic traffic, too early’.

As an enthusiastic service provider, you ought to stay intact to keyword research, for they would acknowledge back with the following benefits.

Higher rankings in organic search

Everything begins here! The idea of using keywords in content laid the foundation of Search engine Marketing and stays unbeatable even today. Strategic placing of keywords in content can cause dramatic fluctuation in your rankings. Use appropriate keywords especially in root domain names, page titles, URL and even anchor texts. Also, this is the most cost effective tool in digital marketing. The need to adapt paid searches arises when your organic strategy isn’t working. Work on it!

Though paid search results have gained momentum, more than 75% of searchers still go for organic results than PPC campaigns.

They help discover new business ideas

Broaden your research a step further and you may encounter new keywords hinting at potential business opportunities. For example, one of our clients dealt with mobile accessories. We were working on expected keyword shortlisting such as ‘mobile covers’, ‘best mobile covers’ etc. However, drilling more we discovered tremendous searches for ‘mobile leather covers’. The business wasn’t dealing with the product but ventured into it soon and generated huge sales.

Leaving room for some more researching in your plan will definitely unearth new ideas. Try different combinations and track their performances.

High volume traffic

The most traditional yet effective metric is the use of frequently used keywords. After so many trends setting in, using most popular searched keywords still garners tremendous traffic to the site; which in turn fuels your online presence dramatically. However, such keywords have to be stapled with relevant content, appropriate density and the quality of traffic received.

The competition is cut throat and capturing high volumes of traffic stays a challenge. It’s too early to overlook high frequency keywords. Keep intact your traditional know how and inculcate all popular keywords.

Better engagement with readers

Since keywords attract high volumes, it eventually concluded to way better connectivity with readers. Hubspot confirmed businesses that blog and take it seriously experienced a record 95% hike in inbound links and 50% more visitors to their websites. Blogging is a lucrative medium to address user queries and boost engagement with readers. Again, appropriate selection of keywords is the game changing metric here.

Helps bridge language gaps

The web has an indefinite reach and a business’ native language hardly covers every culture. This deprives them from potential users who are looking out for similar services as they but can’t really reach due to language differences. While releasing your product and services in every language isn’t a solution, keywords can help.

Keyword research can lead you to relative searches conducted in different languages. According to your geographic reach, you could think of expanding your services to the selective yet most convenient foreign lands. At least the valuable insights could be used to publish digital / traditional advertising content in a different language, thus reach more people.

Understand what’s your competition is up to

Everyone’s out and transparent over the web! While Google has been trying to keep a check on blatant copying of content (and succeeded though), it is hard for competitors to entirely hide their marketing strategy and be the silent player. While there’s no direct way of deriving what your competitor is upto, keywords could lead you to insightful information.

Just a simple search can lead you to the businesses with the same keywords as you. Think about the dedicated tools that are capable of retrieving near to accurate information about businesses playing around with keywords.

They help achieve better website experience

Firstly, keywords are a great reference source to improve information in the content and even add new pages for potential exclusive services. Fine tuning your website content is a continuous exercise and directly thrives according to the feedback from keyword research.

Secondly, keywords could be aptly used to navigate to other pages. Keywords as hyperlinks in the landing pages can route to more detailed content; may be another page, whitepapers, case studies etc.

This cuts down on extended browsing time invested in fetching valuable information. Readers actually prefer being walked through than manual scanning.

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Content Marketing is essential, as essential as it is to have application developers on board. However, certain prerequisites have to be assured.

1. Absence of Marketing Strategy in Place

Let’s get over the myth that Content Marketing is one of your many strategies in the portfolio. Infact, it is a catalyst to boost your current marketing approach. So, before you plunge at publishing blogs, white papers and case studies make sure you know your target leads, their expectations and your readiness to serve them. Marketing content without inculcating a set strategy is just an unprepared attempt towards trial and error.
What to do – Have an intricately researched plan to pitch the market and ‘then’ utilize the content power to capture attention. If it is still a strategy for you, then execute it in the end.

2. Ineffective customer interaction

CRM tools sell like hot cakes for some reason. Capturing customer response towards services is highly important to inspire improvements and address their grievances faultlessly. The best blogs waste no time in tapping upon valuable information that an end user would want to consume. Thus, just copying content ideas from here and there in the name of reference would fetch no substantial returns.

What to do – Identify your customer interaction mediums and share the analytics data with the content team, the same as you do with the sales guys. This is aimed at prioritizing more relate able topics.

3. You are dependent on a team of ‘journalists’

The decade left us with a valuable lesson of the R&D significance. The most talked about brands had their bets placed on innovation backed by rigorous research. While the competition gets aggressive, it is highly required that you identify the gaps and roll out exclusive solutions.
Content quality depends extensively on never heard before opinions and solutions. A team of writers only can assure superlative hold over vocabulary; is that what you had wanted?

What to do – Include writers with sound technical knowledge of the subject. The same should inspire them to conduct real time research and curate content that hits the bull’s eye.

4. Promoting your product

Ofcourse that’s where all roads lead to! But the ‘shout out loud’ approach and flooding the social channels with your product features, success stories etc shall irritate the reader and you may end up in a spam’s folder. Understand this – you have to begin by ‘addressing a trending confusion’ your potential lead is locking horns with.

While walking through the solutions, you could utilize the platform in mentioning about your own product and that how it actually resolves the inconsistency. Many a times you may have to discuss the market challenges without mentioning your product.
The lead connects more with you since you are concerned about ‘resolving the issue’ and not ‘promoting your product’.

What to Do – Encourage your writers to come up with standalone opinions. Let them emerge as Content consultants and not just writers. They should match up to the surface level technical knowledge at the minimum.

5. You are not writing for Search Engines

Time to discard another myth that SEO is a thing of the past! It may not be the crusader anymore but laughing at search engines is like ignoring the entire web. Your content has to be optimally verified before it gets published. All your content marketing efforts are nothing more than an average attempt at shouting in the waters.

What to do – Have a dedicated team of digital marketers. Keep your basics intact and work with essential keywords, trending topics and complying with all SEO norms.

6. And that you are only writing for Search Engines

The missing art of story telling is the pain point here. Actually, a finely tuned balance is needed to satiate both – search engines and humans. You have to write smartly to attract search engines and write creatively to attract readers. The reader has to connect and get convinced that the paper talks about his business. As in point 5, content is not aimed at selling business directly. Only through tapping upon real time customer experiences, stronger relationships could be weaved.

What to do – keeping the end user in mind, use simplified language and steer your focus towards addressing more concerns.

7. Not analyzing the response

Content Analytics – that’s another critical area you may have overlooked. Writing and writing more to publish more worked a decade ago. Your next move to market content should have improvements inspired from the feedback data of previous consumption. Why did or did not a specific article gained more readers, readers cross questioning in the comments, level of agreement or disagreement etc. could all be analyzed.

What to do – Checkout for the most effective Content Marketing analytics tools and build dedicated teams for it.

Don’t expect the results tomorrow! Content Marketing rests on long term benefits that take off steadily. Posting and evaluating the effort again and again will fetch nothing. Remember, Digital Marketing is itself making a significant shift towards ‘slow and steady’ and that’s where you need to hold on.