Find What Your Audience is Looking For- Use Keyword research and Kick around Content Ideas

Okay, you’ve decided on blogging as a way to both educate and inform your viewers in addition to fulfilling content marketing.  You’ve set up your site but have you visualized what content will be considered relevant and useful to your prospective patients and audience?

Sure, you have loads of ideas and concepts but will your viewers be as excited about them as you are? To answer this, research keywords. Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, explains the basics of using keyword research in Introduction to SEO: Tactics and Strategy for Entrepreneurs this way:

 “When you’re thinking about your audience, we want to take a look at the folks we know are in the group we want to target and ask ‘what are they searching for today that they can’t successfully find or aren’t being well exposed to?’”

Rand has a 5-step process for coming up with the specific topics and keywords your audience will be looking for. This will be the foundation of your content marketing strategy.

  1. Brainstorm topics and terms: Start by writing down as many ideas of terms or topics your audience is interested in. It’s good to involve people who work directly with your users at this point, like a customer service or sales rep.
  2. Use a keyword research tool to gather results: Now, it’s time to plug those terms into a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner, Moz, keywordtool.io or any other to see what comes up.
  3. Expand and refine your list: Take that big list and refine or group them together. What looks good? What doesn’t make sense to your business goals?
  4. Build a spreadsheet and prioritize terms: Now, it’s time to get organized. Build a spreadsheet with the data you got in your tool, such as keyword, estimated search volume, difficulty and opportunity and assign a priority to each one. Which is most important to your business?
  5. Outline content that hits the 3 key needs: Take your top terms and outline content that will serve your goals, the user’s needs, and the keyword targeting. This is the trifecta of killer, SEO-friendly content.

Rand’s final piece of advice is to ensure you’re not just aiming to match the content you see ranking #1, but surpassing all competition.  He elaborates:

“What’s the thing where when you read the first few search results you say, ‘This is great, but I wish they…’. If you have great answers to that, don’t ask ‘how do we make something as good as this?’ but say ‘how do we make something 10X better than any of these?” That’s the bar that’s been set because it’s so competitive to try to rank for terms today.”

Have you set up your blogs yet?  Have they been noticed?  Are you seeing any effect with your analytical tools?

If the answer is no to any of the questions above, call 516-647-3002.  Let’s get you started the right way!