Why don’t you just “Google it”? It all begins with that. 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine. The power of search engines like Google cannot be underestimated. Creating a marketing strategy using targeted keywords that appeal to that type of audience, while different than a traditional advertising strategy, is not impossible. It’s all about one thing: keyword phrases.

For the modern marketer, targeting the right audience with your message is about much more than your content strategy. It’s about using the right words, too. Keyword research is one of the most important activities in the inbound marketing field.

Without keywords, there is no point to search engine optimization (SEO).

Without keywords, how can marketers understand their target audience on the internet?

Attracting The Right Kind Of Visitors

You already know that compelling content is favored by search engines, but have you considered all three of your target audiences with your content strategy:

1. Your current customers
2. Your prospective customers
3. The search engines

The usefulness of keyword phrases cannot be underestimated. As part of your overall inbound marketing strategy, you want to understand what keyword phrases your target audience is searching for so you can respond to their needs. Attracting the right kind of visitors to your website or blog is largely determined by your ability to use the right keyword phrases.

How can you do this?

You must conduct keyword research.

What Is Keyword Research?

In the simplest of forms, keyword research is the inbound marketer’s market research. Keywords will tell you what people are interested in. With the right insight into keyword data, you can find out a great deal of information about your target market, including:

• Their interests
• Their search habits
• The language they are using to discuss topics of interest
• How they are finding your product or service
• What they think about a specific topic
• Questions they have about specific topics

This information is incredibly valuable to you – with this in mind, you can be an immense resource by providing all of the content that meets your audience’s needs.

If you can master how to conduct keyword research, not only will you benefit with increased organic search engine traffic but you are going to benefit from customers and prospects that are increasingly satisfied.

How To Do Keyword Research

Now that you understand the importance of keyword phrases for your overall inbound marketing strategy (and your business) surely you want to know how to get started.

Fortunately, there are many tools available that make it very easy for you to gain an understanding of search traffic and keyword phrases:

• Google Trends:Using Google Trends, you can narrow it down to see what is popularly searched in your region. This is a good starting place to generate new ideas for topics or search terms.
• Google AdWords Keyword Planner: This tool can give you an idea of what people are searching for, the competition, and how many people are searching for the terms. Relative to the base term you plug in, you can get a wide array of suggestions similar.
• UberSuggest:This is a keyword suggestion tool. This free resource allows you to make use of keyword suggestions based on what users are currently searching on the internet. All you have to do is enter a term in the search box and the tool takes your base term and extracts suggestions. You click on any word it suggestions to receive further suggestions.
• Google Analytics:This should be your final place to go for suggestions for keywords. Using this tool, you can see what keywords actually brought traffic into your website. Scroll down to Acquisition>Keywords>Organic and view the different keywords. You can choose to export this list to Excel for a deeper look.
  • Pro Tip:Plug these keywords into one of the other tools to gauge the competition and traffic.

How To Do Keyword Research: Advanced Tips

Believe it or not, there is power in all of your inbound marketing efforts when it comes to keyword phrases. Consider what your audience is talking about on social media – how can you leverage these topics for a blog?

As a dynamic marketer, you always want to stay ahead of the curve: infuse popular culture topics, questions that you get from your audience, and socially engaging topics in your content marketing strategy.

Do you want to learn more about how to do keyword research? Download the step by step Keyword Research Strategy Guide.