Here is our team at Anchor, hard at work tracking specific keywords.

Keywords are the pinnacle of SEO and online marketing, and therefore should be the focus of any modern digital marketing strategy. Unfortunately, the exponential growth of digital platforms and online infrastructure has not made it easy for marketers to keep up. Trends in online marketing continue to surface every day, and can change in a matter of months. Google is said to change their SEO algorithms about 4-5 times a year. Taking into account the number of social media platforms available for marketing, keeping up with online marketing trends can seem intimidating and overwhelming. However, by mastering the way you apply keywords, you’re well on your way to gaining some good SEO traction.

Unless the web becomes entirely video based and the functions of words are no longer a part of the web, as long as words exist on the web, keyword optimisation will always stay relevant to online marketing. Simply put, keywords define what your content is about. They help search engines rank your website amongst others in order of relevance to a particular search term. With an abundance of websites on the internet, and hundreds more being added each day, there just isn’t enough space to show everybody’s content. With the amount of information on the web relating to one particular topic, you’d be extremely lucky to find your website appear on search pages without using some online marketing strategies and keyword optimisation.

The reality is, if you want your business to take off and stay recognised online you have to constantly produce and monitor your content and keywords to stay at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). According to Mr. SEO, websites ranked on the first page of Google’s search results page get 91.5% of Google traffic, which is a sure-fire way of saying that if your business comes up on the first page of results, you are going to find yourself more customers and clients. Did you know that less than 5% of online users browse the second page, and this figure goes down to a low 1.1% by the third page. So, first page = your marketing goal.

Picking targeted and specific keywords is just as important as any other part of a digital campaign. It involves just as much strategy, creativity and effort. The use of trending words especially, will reap more rewards for websites and help gain authority and dominance within the search engine. It is also important to keep your target audience in mind. Before writing mindlessly, it is crucial to do your research first. It is important to ask the following questions.

• Who is your target audience?
• What kind of content would attract them to your website?
• What words will keep them interested in reading?

The keywords you pick to use for your content shows understanding of your audience and their needs. If you are targeting young people for beach-wear you might expect them to use words like “bikinis” and “boardshorts”. You probably wouldn’t get as much traction using keywords such as “bathers”, “swimsuit” or “beach shorts”, as it’s not the common terminology among (most) young people. Choosing keywords that are not reflective of your audience could cost your customers, so remember to do some research into your audience and their use of language. So, how do you know if you have picked the right keywords to target your audience? Lucky for us, while technology has made it incredibly tough for us to keep up with online marketing trends, it has also provided us with effective tools to stay on top of our marketing game. Here are some of the top platforms compiled by Anchor Digital to help you check the relevance and success of your keywords. Check out our infographic for a breakdown of current SEO tools that we rate, and read on for more information.

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz Keyword Explorer is an SEO based education company on SEO trends. They also provide community pages for discussions, and informative blog articles on the latest SEO strategies. SEO packages are also provided to help you with your online marketing needs. These packages consist of different SEO analytic tools that measure the effectiveness of your website. Analytics help you track our ranking, identify issues customers may be experiencing with your website and provide recommendations accordingly for optimising your web page.  Customer reports are also provided for feedback on website performance. Some of the tools in these packages can also help you with backlinking by finding linking opportunities.

If you are keen to give it a go, then you’re in luck. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial before actually committing to buy a package. These free features help you identify the strength of your keywords. Specifically, Keyword Explorer is a free service offered by Moz that lets you search up URLs. To try this feature, all you need to do is sign up and from there you’re permitted to query 10 search terms per month.

KWFinder

This is one of the most powerful tools for content marketing! By Mangools, this software allows you to find keywords with “low SEO difficulty and high search volume”. This means you can write content targeting specific keywords that are both searched widely using search engines but also are easy to rank highly for. You can organise these words in lists and use filters to categorise them too. As well as knowing which keywords will best benefit your business, this site can also track and analyse which keywords your competitors are ranking for! This will help you identify content gaps and ensure you can successfully plan your content strategy with keywords backed with significant research.

You can trial KWFinder FREE for 10 days which includes getting 10 lookups per 24 hours as well 5 competitor and 50 related keywords per lookup. After you’ve exhausted the ‘try before you buy’ period, there are three different plans to choose from. So if propelling your business through content strategy is something you’ve been meaning to prioritise, then this is an investment you won’t regret!

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is yet another analytical tool that provides information to you regarding your SEO strategy. This application can be used online and for free and provides you with analytics regarding your websites impressions, click-through-rate, and position in Google’s SERP.  By chucking in your URL, Google Search Console can provide you with an Index Coverage Report which notifies you of any pages that cannot be indexed by Google, so that you can fix these swiftly. You can opt to receive email alerts for any issues identified, which Google Search Console will monitor for you, as well as confirmation notifications for when they’re fixed.

The best thing is, you can also check the usability of your website on mobile. This is increasingly important as more and more people go mobile for their web needs. Understanding your current situation is important for developing an idea of where to go, and in turn, developing keywords for SEO strategy. With Google Search Console, you can see what does work, what doesn’t, and work from there.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

Much like Moz’s Keyword Explorer, Google Keyword Planner lets you search for words and phrases related to your product or service to help you find the most relevant keywords. Further, to help you narrow down on your list, Google Keyword Planner also lets you see how often certain words are searched and how patterns have changed over time.This is particularly helpful in informing and developing a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign. The most helpful feature of Google Keyword Planner, is its bid estimation results. This feature provides you with the estimated cost of minimum bids on specific keywords.

To use Google Keyword Planner, you will first need to create a Google account. Much like Google Search Console, this is a free tool developed by Google to help small business with their digital marketing efforts. This tool is offered as part of Google Ads, a free service provided by Google to help online advertisers.

Google Analytics

Last but not the least from the Google family, let’s have a look at the services Google Analytics provides to users to help measure your website’s performance on search engine results with numerical statistics. On top of seeing all your website’s metrics in an easy to understand format, Google Analytics also gives you the ability to check your mobile app’s performance through an easy-to-use interface and shareable reports. The data and insights provided by Google Analytics are made to guide best practices when it comes to online marketing, content, advertising and publishing strategy. Google Ads in particular works extremely well with Google Analytics. After running through your analytics, you’re better equipped to decide on the appropriate keywords for your business.

SEMrush

One of Anchor’s favourite SEO based applications is SEMrush. SEMrush helps with research and the development of keywords. SEMrush is capable of identifying over 2,000,000 keyword ideas. From domain specific keyword ranking to organic research, SEMrush has all the analytical features required to help conduct comprehensive research to find out how popular a brand is and how popular their marketing strategy is.

The Site Audit Tool analyses web pages, alerts you to issues such as broken links or duplicate content. To help you deal with competition, SEMrush compares your website against your rivals’ to see who ranks higher for most searched keywords, and helps you identify which words you’re missing. Notably, its best feature is the marketing research it is able to provide on your competitors. SEMrush allows you to identify PPC (Pay Per Click) competitors. It will also display their ads, amount spent on PPC as well as their highest performing keywords.

Other points to note:

• They can also help you find suitable long-tail keywords to appeal to a more specific search criteria. So basically, anything keyword-related, they’ve got you.
• You can get a free trial for SEMrush Pro for a week, or you can invest in your SEO and pay for the monthly subscription.
• SEMrush currently offer three different plans - Pro, Guru, and Business which cost between $99.95 - $399.95 a month.
• Alternatively, there is a free version of the program; however, the features provided are limited to one project with fewer tools.  

One last thing to remember

Keyword types

There are three main types of keywords that content creators should have knowledge of. Head keywords, body keywords and long-tail keywords.

• Head keywords are one-word keywords that attract the highest search volume and the highest competition. Head keywords are too general however they are important in providing a generic description of an industry.
• Body keywords are usually two to three word phrases that generate a large search volume but are not as generic as head keywords are they consist of a little more specificity than head keywords. They are used to define a broader niche within your industry.
• Long-tail keywords are specific keywords used to target a certain niche, topic or audience. They are specific phrases that span between 4 to 10 words. These have a low search volume however used the right way, as a whole, can account for the majority of web traffic to your published content.

The most important parts a content marketer needs to make use of are the keywords included in the title, meta titles, content and images. SEO comes automatically from the first couple hundred characters (including spaces!!) of content so make sure that what you want to get across is clearly written at the beginning of your content.

Drop us a line if you're keen to know more about keywords optimisation.