7 Keys to Keyword Research: A Guide for Inbound Marketers

I’d like to welcome today’s guest blogger, Brian Posnanski.  Brian – or @bpoz – has a longstanding relationship with Eloqua.  He runs interactive agency TrafficPRM and, in collaboration with his partner Jocelyn Johnson, he also leads Gravitas PR, a PR firm that did some great work for Eloqua over the years.  We are proud to consider both Brian and Jocelyn friends of the company, and I am personally proud to consider them friends.  Brian has doubled down on SEO and content marketing, and he’s conducted some immensely valuable research into keywords.  He’s generously volunteered to share some of his output here on the It’s All About Revenue blog.

Anyone who travels in inbound marketing circles has probably heard a lot about keywords. And like others involved in social/content/inbound marketing, we have, too—except when it comes to how to go about deriving them.

If good content is essential to success in marketing automation and on the social Web, keywords are the ingredient that makes content searchable and discoverable. That’s why we created our Seven Keys to Keyword Research guide. It’s designed to help inbound, social and content marketers find the right keywords to optimize their content, and ultimately achieve higher organic search ranking.

Our goal is to shed some light on a process that doesn’t need to be a mystery. All too often we see organizations simply pulling a raw list of keywords pulled from Google’s Adwords keyword finder as the basis for their optimization. Unless you are evaluating or filtering those terms, most of them are going to be too generic or too competitive. And unlike SEM or paid search advertising, organic search optimization is about targeting and competing for a dozen or so keywords at a time—not hundreds or even thousands.

Here is a quick topline on the seven keys that we use to derive the right keywords for clients:

Key #1: Assess where you are. Take advantage of your CMS, Google Analytics and other tools to benchmark current rankings. Take note of where you’re starting to better track your growth.

Key #2: Brainstorm a beginning list. Use a combination of people and tools to deduce the kinds of terms that map to your customers’ and prospects’ interests/needs.

Key #3: Don’t rely solely on Google Adwords. See above. Don’t make assumptions. Just because certain keywords get a lot of traffic doesn’t mean they’re right for your organization.

Key #4: Who’s your competition? It’s a lot easier to compete for keywords against weaker websites than against larger ones with higher pagerank. Find your opportunities.

Key #5: Start with a keyword cluster or silo. Which group of keywords is most important to you right now? Be gradual but consistent. Don’t try to optimize everything at once.

Key #6: Give your keywords a home. You’ve got keywords. Now put them somewhere: in blog posts, website copy, news releases and other digital assets.

Key #7: Monitor your progress and adjust your approach. Keep tabs on your organic rankings monthly or weekly. See which ones perform and which ones don’t.

When you finally do have a valuable keyword list, you’ll want to make sure your content creators are using it. One practice we’re fond of: create a short SEO “cheat sheet” with your top keywords and their corresponding landing pages, and have your marketing team keep this at the ready when they write.

We hope the Seven Keys guide is helpful. We will be updating and refining it based on people’s feedback, so don’t be shy with questions or comments!