Keyword Research For Busy Business Owners

Oct 18

This blog is for creative business owners who want to grow their businesses online. I’ll be sharing blog posts that cover an aspect of digital marketing for creatives, whether you sell products or services. It’s a marketing pep talk if you will.

I’ll be talking about all things SEO, marketing funnels, advertising, email marketing, or mindset around marketing. Each post will encourage and inspire you with actionable tips: sans marketing jargon.

When we’re thinking about SEO, we must look at keyword research.

In this blog post, we’ll be covering:

What is keyword research?
Keyword research tools
Types of keywords
Why keyword research is the best marketing skill
How to use keyword research in your business

What Is Keyword Research?

Lots of people hear "SEO" and immediately think of keywords.

But is keyword research SEO? The short answer is: No, it isn't!

Search engine optimisation is a customer-centric marketing approach because we ensure our websites accurately reflect the expressed wants and needs of our ideal customers and clients.

Keyword research is foundational to finding those expressed wants and needs, but it isn't the whole picture. We do keyword research to find out how people are searching for the things we provide, and then we use that information to optimise the content on our websites - which is part of our on page SEO (remember that we also have off page and technical SEO).

When we think "keyword research = SEO", we are minimising both keyword research and SEO.

Keyword research is also a discipline that can benefit your business much more widely than SEO - it can help you with brand management, market research, product and service development, content creation, and trend forecasting.

You may see a lot of copywriters offering SEO services, but what they mean is they can create keyword-optimised content for your site, which is one component of on page SEO.

As I've mentioned in another post, SEO involves much more than optimising our website content for keywords!

So to summarise: Keyword research is about finding the language our customers use to express their wants and needs.

Keyword research is an information-gathering process that can inform our strategy. SEO is the process of taking that information and building out a strategy and a plan of action.

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Keyword Research Tools & Sewing Machines

One of the most common questions I get asked when I’m delivering any kind of live training or workshop is this:

What keyword research tools do you use?

As we saw last week, keyword research is an information-gathering process that informs our SEO strategy and execution.

So the tools we use are important.

But they’re not going to magically make you good at keyword research, and they’re not going to help you do good SEO.

Here’s an analogy:

If you buy yourself a sewing machine, it doesn’t make you good at dressmaking. Sure, you’ve got the tools - but it doesn’t mean you can create a wearable outfit.

It’s the same with keyword research: even if you have the tools, you need to learn the skill behind it.

Keyword research is an information-gathering process, but you will just be overwhelmed and confused unless you have a filter for that information.

We need to develop our filter for keyword research by understanding the customer journey for our business, who our ideal customer is, what needs and desires our business solves, and how keywords are implemented.

And no keyword research tool is going to do that for you!

That said: Keywords Everywhere is my on-the-go tool of choice.

And here’s a pro tip: Don’t listen to people who tell you Google’s Keyword Planner is good for keyword research. It’s not. It’s good for getting ideas, but it’s a paid advertising tool.

The Types of Keywords You Need to Know About

The things people search for in Google and the language they use helps us to understand the intent behind the search. For example, if someone searches for “bakery near me”, they are usually looking for a local result, whereas if they search for “how to bake bread”, they are likely to be looking for tutorials or recipes.

A common mistake for a lot of small business owners is that they use single words as their focus keyword: e.g. on Etsy and YouTube, a lot of people will tag their content with things like “blue”, “business”, or “card” - but these are so generic that you are unlikely to get particularly good results from them!

A “keyword” is more accurately called a “keyword phrase” because it can contain multiple words. And the more words a keyword phrase includes, the more precisely we understand the intent behind the search.

As you think about keywords for your own business, there are some things you need to know about:

Branded keywords are words directly related to your business, like your brand name, maybe your name, and things like your brand name plus reviews or contact. To search for these, people already need to know about your brand.

Unbranded keywords are words related to your products, services, and broader industry - people don’t need to know about your brand for these - they are the opportunity to get found by new clients and customers.

It’s important to focus on ranking for your branded keywords first because that’s part of managing your overall brand and is part of reputation management.

Then, we research unbranded keywords, typically used across our website’s pages and in our content (including blog posts).

Once we’ve got all the data for our keywords, we assign one to each of our web pages and get optimising!

Why Keyword Research Is the Best Marketing Skill

Keyword research is the most valuable marketing skill you can learn.

There, I said it. I love a bold statement, but I was nervous about this one (and some of you might completely disagree with me!).

Why is it the best marketing skill? Because it helps you become a mind-reader for your ideal customers.

What are their goals & dreams?
What do they want or need?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What solutions are they looking for?

When you know how to do keyword research and cultivate the skill of reading the information, it helps you:

Create all your marketing content, including blogs, social captions, emails and adverts
Get inspiration for new products or services inspired by the actual needs your customers are expressing
Understand where the gaps are if you're struggling to sell something
Frame your business in a way that demonstrates what you do in language your customers use

When you know how to do keyword research, you start things with your customer in mind - which means you design a business based on your customers rather than based on what you have to offer to your customers.

People are ultimately on the internet to fulfil their wants and needs - we are naturally self-interested, and when you can frame your marketing around your customer's wants and needs because you know what they are? Then, you will grab and keep people's attention for longer.

Instead of sitting at your desk wondering what to talk about in your next piece of marketing content, imagine having a list of actual questions and topics your ideal customers are interested in knowing about.

So when you write an Instagram caption, create an email newsletter, craft a blog post, or film a YouTube video, you're confident it ties into your brand in a way that adds value to the people you want to attract.

That's what keyword research can do for you.

Plus, you can use keywords all over the internet beyond just your website.

How to Use Keyword Research in Your Business

Your experience with keywords might look something like this:

You’ve put some keywords in your website content (hopefully).
You’ve stuffed some keywords into your Etsy listings
You’ve been stressed about keyword research and what to do with it beyond that.

I also love keyword research because it goes way beyond our website SEO. You can use keywords all over the internet!

As part of our website SEO, we will optimise our content for keywords, adding them to areas like our title, body copy, and image alt text.

As part of marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, we’ll stuff some keywords into our titles and descriptions to increase our visibility to people already browsing that particular marketplace.

But there are also additional ways to use keywords you may not have considered.

Pinterest is a visual search engine: image-based but keyword driven. Use them in your profile, board titles and descriptions, and pin titles and descriptions to increase your traffic from Pinterest.

YouTube

YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google. Repurposing content into videos and putting it on YouTube can significantly increase your visibility across the wider web. Video results will often leapfrog over other results in the search engine results pages.

Instagram

I think Instagram is having a midlife identity crisis, but I’m no Instagram expert, so that’s a story for another time. They recently added a feature to search for content by keywords, so you can use keywords in your profile and captions in theory and increase the likelihood of getting found there.

Keywords drive search engines, so if a platform is built on a search algorithm - for example, Pinterest and YouTube, you can use keywords to increase your visibility.

How are you currently using keywords in your business? Is it a missed opportunity? Let me know in the comments!