Category: Marketing | Posted date: 2019-09-27 05:27:03 | Updated date: 2019-09-27 05:31:00 | Posted by:
When you have been in enough meetings about SEO, the words ‘keywords’ and ‘search volume’ begin to lose their importance - they are simply another part of the job, another datapoint digital marketers use to deliver the best results they can.
When you have been in enough meetings about SEO, the words ‘keywords’ and ‘search volume’ begin to lose their importance - they are simply another part of the job, another datapoint digital marketers use to deliver the best results they can.
However, it is important to remember that SEO is just a tactic - certainly an essential one, but not the be all and end all. When we take a step back and think about the wider strategic context, these SEO buzzwords take on a different light.
Before we go on, let’s first go back to the basics and understand what keywords really are.
A keywords is a search term that has been known as significant and relevant to a particular piece of content around either a question relating to your offering, or to a specific product or service.
But where do these keywords come from? In terms of how digital marketers get to them, we use different tools - maybe the most common of these is the Google Ads Keyword Planner. This enables us to see how many searches a specific term is getting per month, and also find related search terms terms that are similar or relevant to the topic or audience.
Now this is all basic stuff, but within it lies an important concept to get your head around. Yes, keywords and their associated search volumes are datapoints - however those datapoints doesn’t come out of thin air.
A keyword and its associated search volume is literally what a user has typed into a search engine, like Google, and how often that has occurred over a certain period of time.
Why does this matter? Well, the first thing to realize is that, more often than not, people don’t change their language when they search.
When I’m searching for items or services, I won’t consider the terms I’m going to use instead, I’ll use what first comes into my mind. Essentially, I will use whatever feels most natural. This is likely to become even more important as the frequency of voice search continues to grow.
The point here is that what I search for is a reflection of what I think. Or the way I think about the product or service will be directly reflected in the way I search.
This is the reason why something that gets thrown around is the SEO world that seems basic can actually be incredibly powerful when it comes to formulating your digital marketing strategy and helping you make the best decision in a wider business context.
Beyond simply telling you which terms you should be optimizing for in your website copy or which terms you should be targeting with your PPC campaigns, keywords can help to shape and inform strands of activity across your digital marketing strategy.
There is always an amount of effort, resources and cost attached to the production of the kinds of high-quality digital assets that are going to give you an edge. Whether it’s a whitepaper, an infographic, a video, or new functionality for your website, these things are not for free.
Search volumes will offer you a way to scope out the level of interest in a specific asset before you even start working on it, adding another layer to your pitch for time or money.
For example, if I were looking to justify the need for copywriting, design and promotion of a content strategy guide, I might use the following search volumes to identify interest:
Already, I have 130 searches per month from users who are looking for the asset I’m looking to produce. I could continue to add keywords like content strategy template pdf, digital content strategy best practice guide, and content marketing pdf to add another 50 searches per month.
I’m not simply building a picture of the level of specific interest in what I’m creating, I’m also starting to learn what that asset might need to be – in this case a PDF – and also some of the topics that I should look to cover. In this scenario, both strategy and production, as well as some kind of template, seem like points that need to be hit.
At this time, I’m already significantly ahead of where I was when I started, which was the initial thought of ‘maybe I should pitch for some resources to create an asset around content marketing’. I now understand what kind of asset to create, what it should be about, and how many people are searching for it per month. What’s more, I already have some great ideas about what the asset should be called.
When it comes to working out where to put your marketing budget, there’s often a decision to be made about which of your products or services to put your budget behind – for instance, which service is going to be the main focus of your programmatic display activity in the next 3 months?
Looking at the search volumes around those products or services – both at a brand and generic level – can help to inform that decision.
Here are some examples of how search volumes can help you make decisions about your wider digital paid media strategy.
Example 1
You might see, having looked at the search volumes around your products and services, that your priority product has the advantage of the highest search volumes. As that is the business priority you can push budget into the wider promotion of that product. You can push social media or display for example, in the knowledge that there is already consideration for that product through search.
The idea here is that by showing that message to prospects that are already considering your product, you will increase the likelihood that they go on to convert.
Example 2
You might see that your highest margin product is the one with the lowest search volume. Here you have an issue, there’s a gap between where you have the most to gain and the level of interest being displayed by your audience.
Therefore, you can embark on a different kind of paid media campaign. Rather than looking to convert existing awareness and thought into a conversion, we will look to create that initial awareness and then drive those users into the consideration stage.
We know there’s value to be had here, because the product we’re driving these users towards has a significant margin or some other advantage for us as a business. Over time, all things being done properly, we might even see the aforementioned search volumes begin to improve as we push more users to consider that product.
While it could be seen as obvious that keywords can help us make better decisions about what we do in the digital space, what’s perhaps more interesting is how search volumes can help you make bigger decisions across your business.
The reason I think it’s so important to understand where keywords come from is that’s its so often misunderstood how valuable that insight is.
One thing that’s understood beyond the digital sphere is that consumers are far easier to convince and convert when you’re speaking the same language.
Time and time we’ve seen instances where internal language has resulted in products, services and even entire brands being labelled in a way that is fundamentally alienating to potential customers.