The Importance of Great Keyword Research - Search Engines

If you want to run a successful search campaign, whether using paid or organic techniques, having a thorough understanding of how people search for your products and services is hugely important. It’s often too easy for a business owner to ignore what their customers are looking for online, and think only about the internal jargon that they use to describe products when planning a search campaign, and this often leads to a lack of understanding between end users and publishers which in turn leads to low levels of converting traffic.

Search is actually only a single step in a larger purchase journey that starts off with research and reinforcement behaviours. Few people simply wake up in the morning and search for a particular product without any previous behaviour - there is always a need that precedes the act of searching.

As a marketer, you should always know what the need that you are fulfilling is. This may be expressed as a question like the following:

How do I do

By looking at the search results for this type of question in Google and Bing, you can then find out how the answer is described by the influencers who answer that question initially. An example might be something fairly straightforward such as:

What do I need to clean my alloy wheels?

In a lot of cases, these types of question are answered in forums or on Q&A websites like Yahoo Answers and include information about the things that people need:

To clean your car wheels, you need an abrasive sponge, a bucket of water, and a solvent to remove brake dust.

This sets out three main products that a user will subsequently need to buy, and also provides them with the search terms that they will ultimately use: Abrasive sponge; bucket; brake dust solvent.

You can follow a similar pattern with almost any type of product that you may sell, and get the same answers that a user will. You can then build them into your search campaign because these are the types of keyword that a user will actually search for, whereas you as a business owner might think that they actually search for things like “alloy wheel sponge, which is generally not the case.

Your keyword research will often provide you with content opportunities to answer specific questions for your audience and influence their later behaviour. If the answers to the questions that you ask are not good enough or lack information, you should add those questions into your own keyword strategy so that you can capture users earlier in the buying process. This approach means that rather than having to compete on highly competitive final step searches, you are actually able to capture attention earlier and with a carefully thought out content strategy, be able to provide users with a totally comprehensive experience that not only answers their question with useful, accurate information, but also provides them with links to the products that you sell, reducing the number of searches that they need to make later and simplifying their experience.
View the original article here