The key to successful online marketing is getting traffic. And keywords are the vehicle you need to use to get more leads and potential customers to your websites and sales funnels. In this article, I’ll go over just how to drive traffic with the right keywords to attract the right type of traffic to your online business.
Using the Right SEO Tools
The first important step is to choose the right SEO tools to do your keyword research. It’s fine to start with free tools like keyword.io or askthepublic.com, but for the best results, I recommend using a premium tool such as ahrefs or SEMrush.
If you’re concerned about having to pay for these SEO tools, you can just sign up for a trial subscription, do all the keyword research you need, then just cancel. With ahrefs, you can get a 7-day trial for only $7. And, SEMrush actually still has a free trial offer.
How to Choose the Best Keywords
In this example, I’m using ahrefs to do our keyword research.
First, go to the Keyword Explorer section and enter some keywords. In this example, we’re doing a fitness website, so we’ll type in some appropriate keywords.
You and then get a list of related keywords that contain the ones you specified. They key data to look at are the first two columns (KD and Volume). KD stands for keyword difficulty and is a measure of how competitive that keyword is. Volume lets you know how many searches per month there have been for that keyword.
What you want to look for are keywords with high volume but low keyword difficulty. For new websites, the lower KD the better. I would only concentrate on keywords with a KD lower than 50.
I would also recommend clicking the Questions option which will give you a list of questions containing your keywords. These keyword questions are great ideas for creating content that drives traffic to your site.
Remember the Buying Cycle Process
While traffic volume and keyword difficulty are the two most important elements of good keyword research, they aren’t the total equation. For even more effective keyword usage, you need to keep the consumer buying cycle process in mind. Similar to the task of creating content for your website, most people just concentrate on the actually “buy” or transaction phase—when someone is ready to go ahead and make a purchase. But there is actually a lot that goes on before someone is ready to buy, and you don’t want to miss out on those potential sales either.
Briefly, the four phases of the buying process are Awareness, Consideration, Intent, and Decision. In the Awareness or discovery phase, the consumer may not even be aware of the problem your product solves. In the Consideration phase, you present the options for solving the problem presented in the Awareness phase. In the Intent phase, you present specific reasons or information on why certain products (yours) are better at solving the problem than your competitors. And finally, in the Decision phase, your potential customer is ready to click and make the purchase of your product.
What does all this have to do with keyword research? Well, just as you would tailor your website content when writing for each different phase of the buying cycle, you also need to target different keywords to drive traffic from consumers at each phase. If you just focus on the Decision phase, you’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic and customers.
In order to find out which keywords go with each phase of the buying process, you need to look for specific words within your keyword phrases. Ahrefs refers to the four phases as Informational, Navigational, Commercial Investigation, and Transactional.
In the Informational (or Awareness) phase, you’d look for words like who, what, where, when, why, etc. In the Navigational (or Consideration) phase, you have brand names. In the Commercial (or Intent) phase, you have words like best, top, review, and comparison. And in the Transactional (or Decision) phase, you have words like buy, purchase, coupon, price, and order.
Ahrefs actually has an excellent video where they go into more detail on the subject. You can take a look at it here … https://youtu.be/OMJQPqG2Uas
The main point to keep in mind is that along with keyword difficulty and traffic volume, you should also include a mixture of keywords from each phase of the buying process so you don’t miss out on a huge portion of your potential customer base.
How to Utilize Your Keywords
So now that you have all of your keywords you want to target, what next? If you’re going to use paid ads, then you would naturally bid on those keywords. However, if you want to get organic search traffic, here’s what I would recommend. While these techniques are certainly not new, they still work for me.
- Include your Keywords in the Title of your Article or Blog Post (still highly important)
- Include your Keywords in your Header Tags (H2, H3, etc.)
- Include at least One Image with your Keywords in the Alt Tag
- Include your Keywords in your Lists or Table Data
- Include your Keywords Naturally in the body of your text, but don’t overdo it.
Strive for Topical Authority
The above tips are great for creating your individual articles and blog posts. But these days Google is more about topical authority. Instead of just having one article on a certain subject, it’s better to have multiple pieces of content related to the same topic or keywords—which you can then link to each other to establish more credibility and authority in the eyes of the search engines.
So, for the best results, don’t just stop after you’ve written one article targeting your keywords. Continue to generate more content on that topic and you’ll have a much better chance of ranking higher in Google and driving more traffic to your business.
Resources
Here are the links for Ahrefs and SEMrush:
- Best Landing Pages - November 5, 2020
- Best Email Marketing - October 30, 2020
- DropFunnels Pricing - September 29, 2020
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