Before starting to write, you want to ensure that people on the internet are searching for this content. Even if your article is extremely well written and informative, it will not get the desired traffic as no one is searching for it.

As technology is growing rapidly, keyword research is a great strategy to adapt to the constantly changing Google algorithms and to ensure that your content stays relevant. Expert writers and SEO specialists heavily rely on keyword research to rank their keywords at the top in the organic search results.

As said, with regards to positioning better in the search engine results, established brands concentrate on the approach of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Keywords are the basis of SEO. Therefore, keyword research is quite possibly the most fundamental SEO task. You must realize that keyword research is all about tracking down the correct keywords and placing them effectively in your content.

In this article, we discuss the various steps you need to undertake to be efficient at keyword research and rank your content higher in search rankings.

Need for Keyword Research

Keyword research is about strengthening your SEO strategy. It provides relevant insights to content creators regarding the queries or keywords put in by their target readers on search engines. Recognizing these phases can assist you in forming your content strategy as well as solidifying your broader marketing plan. 

Having a robust keyword strategy will help you envision and understand what people are looking for on the internet. The purpose is to look for what the market wants; what topics are getting high search volumes. Based on this, you can plan your content accordingly.

However, this does not mean that you need to exactly match the keywords that the people are looking for. Merely stuffing keywords into your blog will not help in attaining a higher ranking. With Google’s changing algorithm, it is now all about intent; you must understand the intent of that keyword search and your content must cater to that intent.

You might be already familiar with the industry; its needs and wants, the customers’ psyche etc. However, do not make the mistake of assuming things. You may use your expertise to confirm your findings, but always rely on solid research to make decisions. Data-driven decisions help achieve your goals more effectively and efficiently. Apart from this, you may also find some myth-busters, when you conduct research based on data as intuitions can often prove to be wrong.

The following are some of the reasons to conduct data-driven keyword research before developing your content strategy:

• Helps in drawing quality traffic to your blog.
• Target customers at various stages (from need recognition to purchase decision) of the buying process.
• Cater to the requirements of your target group.
• Achieve improved search engine rankings.
• More opportunities to build new links and grow existing ones.
• Find relevant topics to write on.
• Increased promotions.

Process of Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research is a complex process; it requires a lot of effort and time. However, following the 7 steps mentioned below to improve your search engine rankings and achieve your SEO goals.

1. Identify your niche/expertise

The first step while starting a blog is to identify your niche. This will help you to ideate a flow for your blog and explore new perspectives or schools of thought on that topic. It will enable you to optimize your page with the most relevant keywords. This will also ensure that your content is relevant to your particular industry, offerings, and target group.

Some of the ways to understand and plan the topics are as follows:

• Talk to your existing customers and understand how they perceive your brand or the terms they use to describe your brand.
• Be active on various platforms like forums or social media to know the current discussions.
• See Wikipedia’s table of contents.
• Check the ‘related searches’ section on search engines.
• See the suggestions offered on websites like Youtube or Google.

2. Plan and set your goals

As you begin with your mission, keep the end goal in mind. To determine your goal, you need to understand various aspects of your business such as what is your brand about, what message do you want to convey, who is your audience, what is unique about you among other things.

Once you have figured out these aspects, you need to fix the objective of your strategy. It may be to increase the number of subscribers, increase daily traffic, improve SEO ranking, etc. This objective will provide the direction to your whole content strategy. It will also give purpose to your content via a decent framework.

3. Create a list of topics

Once the research process has begun, you should start making notes to organise your thoughts and findings. Making a list of the possible topics will help you to sort and figure out which prospects you want to target. This may feel like a cumbersome process initially, but when you have to deal with a large number of keywords, this will prove to be a helpful step.

While keeping in mind the niche you have selected and the goals of your strategy, determine the subjects you want to write about. Further, divide these broad subjects into specific topics that each content piece will talk about. After this, you can finally attribute keywords to each topic.

You can use online tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to help you with your research and keyword planning. It will help you keep a track of your keywords which can be useful in the successful implementation of your strategy.

4. Review the search intent

As stated earlier also, merely adding a large number of keywords into your content will not ensure a higher page ranking. This happens as your keywords are compared with the queries put in by users to examine the search intent.

Search intent refers to the reason why people are searching for a particular term. You need to understand the purpose that people want to solve when they are entering a particular keyword into the search engine; what are the factors that affect their search behavior.

Once you have understood the behavioral pattern of your target group, you will develop a broad idea about how to carry your keyword research. This way, you can focus on not only including high-volume keywords, but also those words which match the search intent of your target audience.

5. Strike a balance of seed and long-tail keywords

Seed keywords refer to short search terms that form the base of a keyword strategy. They are directly related to your topic and do not include modifiers. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are more descriptive. They are more related to your sub-topics and generally include modifiers.

A good SEO strategy is all about finding the right balance between the two. It must include words and phrases that cover a broad spectrum. It is more likely that a long-tail keyword will match the intent of the user. Therefore, long-tail keywords attract a more relevant audience to your website. They usually have a higher conversion rate. On the other hand, seed keywords are more successful in getting clicks as they are specific to you.

6. Watch out for competitors

One way to identify important keywords is to keep an eye on your competitors and the industry in general. Check out which keywords are they using and how successful their SEO strategy is. This will prove to be a good starting point from where you can build your strategy. To make your work organized and smooth, you can use various SEO tools such as SEMrush to conduct a competitor study. 

7. Analyze the keywords

After all the keywords have been shortlisted and gathered, it is now time to evaluate them. Ideally, you should use many different metrics to filter the ones which are most suitable for you. These may include search volume, competition level, etc. The idea is to ensure that you are making the right decision with the help of data.

Conclusion

Once you are through with the aforementioned steps, you will be ready to develop a strong SEO strategy with the help of efficient keyword research. It is complex and may take up a lot of time. However, the returns are worth the effort, especially in the long run.

Keyword research is a vital step when you are creating content for the internet. To explain the entire article, in a nutshell, it can be said that the keywords are your main topics. Match them with the user search intent, understand your competition, and place them smartly in your content.

The post How to Do Keyword Research to Get Your Articles Ranked? appeared first on Tech Web Space.

You might think that videos would not prove to be effective for business associates and are generally a part of companies operating in B2C. However, you will be astonished to know the statistics that prove video marketing works equally well for a B2B setting too.

According to a poll conducted amongst digital marketers by Microsoft’s professional social network on video marketing for B2B brands, these are the results:

• Around 93% of people said it helps to encompass creative storytelling opportunities
• On average, 62% responded it helps build brand awareness
• 78% of people agreed on getting higher quality leads.

While the purpose of forming a viable video marketing strategy is the same for B2B and B2C brands, the content and the approach for both of these settings is different. B2C videos are fun and engaging compared to professional and educational videos for B2B brands.

What is video marketing?

Video marketing is a versatile tool. Along with proving to be an effective channel, it helps raise brand awareness, engage your audience on social media, educate your prospects, enable selling through testimonials, and help make the decision process of customers fast. Videos can in fact be used throughout the whole sales funnel from helping you to generate leads to drive conversions.

Types of videos to produce for B2B marketing:

• Brand videos
• Case-study videos
• Testimonial videos
• Product or service video
• Explainer videos

Benefits of Video Marketing

One of the most consumed forms of content, videos in the B2B setting target consumers who tend to be more aware and do a significantly high amount of research. Hence, here is why video marketing is amazingly effective:

• Drives traffic
• Nurtures prospects
• Provides detailed knowledge to customers
• Improves customer engagement
• Increases audience retention rate
• Helps create remarketing campaigns
• Tap clients at different points in the B2B sales cycle
• Complements other marketing efforts including SEO, blogging, social media.
• Help shorten long-sales cycles
• Creates a long-lasting impression
• Enhances search ranking
• Aids account-based marketing (ABM)

To get into more detail of the last but two points, publishing a video helps you get free exposure in the search results that you need to leverage on. Use the best SEO practises and you will see that video results frequently appear in the top of the Google searches helping your brand get better rankings.

We all know that B2B business is about targeting specific prospects and therefore a personalized ABM strategy makes more sense. People tend to get thousands of messages/emails every day, adding a video in your email will help you stand out. Hence, customized content in a video format will drive the prospect’s decisions faster.

To highlight it, videos are the type of marketing content with the best ROI

Steps To Create a Video Marketing Strategy

As discussed, there is a high amount of importance of video marketing for B2B businesses. Around 68% of organizations were willing to increase their investment in video marketing last year, as highlighted in a study by Heinz Marketing.

Operating in the B2B field, you might face it challenging to create videos that have a wider reach. Therefore, before you begin with framing your B2B marketing strategy, it is crucial for you to know and define your target audience. Understand them and their preferences to create content that resonates with them.

Now, here’s how you can frame your video marketing strategy.

1.    Define your marketing objective

Know what is the purpose of the video that you are trying to create. As Stephen Covey says, ‘begin with the end in mind’, this means that outline what you want to achieve out of the campaign before you start to plan it. Doing this will ensure that your account for the ultimate aim in all the decisions that you make for framing the video marketing strategy.

It is always recommended to have only one single goal in your focus. This helps in keeping the content and the style of video in alignment. Having too many goals to achieve will mess things as you will keep shifting your focus regularly. The key is to also consider the phase of the sales funnel that you are targeting through your video content strategy.

2.    Outline your resources for the strategy

Before you begin with the process of creating the content, calculate the time and the cost of the video production. Decide on the type of video format that you want to pursue to meet your desired aims. List down what all will be needed to accomplish the task.

Figure out if you want to create the video in-house or whether you would want to outsource the process. Making a payment to outside experts would make it more affordable as you would not have to invest in specialized equipment, professional videographers and scriptwriters, or bear any other overheads. The point is to make a decision after accounting for your budget, available resources, any limitations, or present opportunities.

3.    Decide on the publishing channel

Once you have your target audience defined, and you know the goal of your marketing strategy, the next step is to choose a platform where you want to publish your video. Select a channel which will make it easier for you to reach your target audience and maximize your outcomes.

Initially, if you are producing only one or two types of B2B videos, it is better to focus on one platform and build the audience there. Apart from the video content that you create for platforms, having one brand video is critical. This brand video should be on your website homepage and on your social media profiles to raise brand awareness.

4.    Create & publish the video

Creating a video requires more than just getting someone to sit in front of the camera and talk about the topic. It is about creating quality through content and refined video production to offer value to the audience.

You need to make exciting videos and not just talk about your product or service. A professional looking effective and educative visual content will appeal more to the B2B audience. One very important point to keep in mind when creating a video is to pay attention to where they are going to be pushed in the sales funnel.

At this point in time, it is effective to know whether you want to invest in content creation or professional video creation. In the beginning, you can hire a digital marketer or a video production company to mentor you through the process.

When creating the video check the requirements of the platform you are aiming to publish on. Youtube and other social media platforms have their own requirements regarding length, format, etc. Publish the video on the suitable channel and promote it on other channels for higher reach. Increase your engagement by responding to the comments and feedback by the viewers.

5.    Track and analyze your results

Now that you have put in the efforts and invested the resources, it is essential to measure the success of your video marketing campaign too. Track your results in alignment with your set goal to know the extent of your success.

The statistical data retrieved through analytics will also help you to know the points where you performed well or where you need to put in more thought. This helps to improve future video marketing efforts as you can take the points into account that led to below expectation results or that led to your video’s effectiveness.

Videos are considered to be a great way to connect with potential customers and to engage with your existing audience. It helps them learn more about your business and other various related concepts. You can use videos to boost and repurpose your written content. Keep the videos short, simple and interesting to gain and retain the audience’s attention. In a B2B setting, videos are professional, educative and help the customers overcome the barriers to attain value. Hence, it is a must-have in the marketing mix of all B2B brands. Keep in mind your goal, audience, content and platform for your video marketing to generate quality leads.

The post B2B Video Marketing: A Lead Generation Strategy appeared first on Tech Web Space.