Marketing Tips: Keyword Research and Planning For Improved SEO

If you’re looking to improve your SEO and haven’t done much research into keyword planning, you might not realize how important it really is. Knowing how to use and find the right keywords is arguably the most important skill a marketer can hone when it comes to search effectiveness. The start of effective SEO comes from a well-built keyword map or keyword plan.

What is keyword mapping?

“Keyword mapping is the process of assigning or mapping keywords to specific pages on a website based on keyword research. Based on your mapping process you are able to then make specific on-page SEO recommendations to help make the page more relevant to the mapped keywords.” Says Adam Bate of SEO Brothers.

How to start keyword planning

Step One: Research

Put together a list of all of the words you might want your business to appear when someone searches that word. It would be nearly impossible to achieve getting your business to rank on the first page of search results for every word you choose but here you can shoot for the stars.

Tools like Moz, SEMrush and the Google keyword planner can help you expand your list and include faceted keywords you may not have initially thought of.

Step Two: Filter

Work on removing any duplicated words, as well as any that you know for a fact you won’t rank for (taking out branded terms from competitors is usually a good starting point).

Now set your keywords into sets: Priority, Secondary, and Other Terms.

1. Priority terms: Should be keywords you want to appear for right away. They need to imply that you have the answer to a question or the ability to fulfill a need; be a high volume keyword that is worth the investment, and need to be related to current and upcoming (near-future) business.
2. Secondary terms: These will come into play later on, once priority keywords are locked into optimized pages that are query-responsive. These should be keywords that relate to your site, have a decent volume and imply questions you don’t have the expertise to answer.
3. Other terms: You’ll ignore these for now, and note why you may or may not want to re-evaluate these keywords later on

Step Three: Map keywords to pages

The first thing to do when mapping is to scrape Google for your keywords and current rank. You don’t have to do this, but generally, it is useful to be able to keep things simple, rather than to manually map each page, regardless of how Google feels about scraping and rank tracking (the general consensus is not incredibly positive). Now you need to ensure that the content on the page that the clickthrough directs to actually answers what is being searched for. Sometimes your map will work perfectly, and other times, Google gets it totally wrong, so remapping is necessary to close the gap. You’ll go through this same process when you’re working with mapping URLs, starting new pages, as well as when optimizing content and existing pages.

Keyword planning is a big job, but when done right can get you noticed and moved up in the ranks of the SEO world. For a more in-depth walkthrough of keyword mapping for SEO and content creation, see this blog post from Moz that will give you a map to mapping.  

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How To Create a Business Plan

Starting a business is an exciting thing, and if done right, can be life-changing. But there are key steps that must be taken in order to give your potential business the best chance for success. At the top of this list is having a business plan.

What is a business plan?

Hubspot’s definition of a business plan is as follows: “A business plan is a living document that maps out the details of your business. It covers what your business will sell, how it will be structured, what the market looks like, how you plan to sell your product or service, what funding you’ll need, what your financial projections are, and which permits, leases, and other documentation will be required.”

Essentially, a business plan shows if your idea is worth putting in the continued effort to make it flourish. You are forced to look at the big picture and explain every detail that defines your holistic view.

Making a business plan

Building a  business plan may seem like an unwieldy task, but it doesn’t have to be. Keep it short and simple, as too much information or minute detail could confuse or distract anyone reading the plan such as shareholders, investors or any others involved in the inception of your business. The plan should also have a certain amount of flexibility built into it, and be able to grow and evolve as the vision for your business does. Finally, you’ll want to really dig into what makes your idea for a business unique within your space. Being able to stand out from a crown is a major prerequisite when starting a business.

Now you’re ready to put everything together and write your very own business plan. These templates organized by INC. are a great place to start and will help you organize all of the information you will need to present.

To fill out these templates, you’ll need to be ready with these sections of information:

1. An executive summary
2. A company description and business model
3. A market analysis
4. A description of your products and/or services
5. Outlines of operation and management roles
6. A basic sales and marketing strategy
7. A financial plan that includes costs, funding and profit/revenue projections
8. A summary of the above information

With that, you’re all set to start pitching your business and moving onto other tasks like choosing and registering a name, determining your legal structure and getting ready for a successful launch.

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How To Make Your Content Shareable

Anyone that works in marketing knows that shares on a post are a key component of determining its success;  shares organically generate attention, increase your reach and create an environment that is open for more likes. In a sort of domino effect,  a shared blog or social media post will be shared by one person, then another, and another yet after that continually. This sharing community can help build brand awareness organically, and all you have to do is create content that your audience wants to share.

To do this you must answer these questions: Who is your audience? Who is their audience? What type of content is being shared in this environment? Who do these audiences follow? Once you have the answers, you can begin to generate relevant content that your audience will want to share with theirs. Take some of the following points into consideration when creating content:

TITLE

There are mountains of digital content available. Close to two million blog posts are written every day. Social media user numbers are increasing every day. Writers and social media users are constantly creating, sharing and liking content. It’s a climb to get your content noticed. A key to getting noticed is having an eye-catching title. To do this, start small. Have your general topic flushed out. From that topic, you can come up with a few more specific title options. These titles can also act as a guide so that your blog post can move in a more specific direction.

Now cut apart those titles to build out the title you’ll use. Test titles with bold, strong language against more conservative and direct titles, and compare. Choose a title that works for you, your content and your audience.

SEO

SEO is important to get initial traction. But trying too hard to optimize can make your titles and posts sound awkward and often robotic (also, Google doesn’t reward over optimization, and in some cases punishes it by ranking your posts lower). Remember, many potential readers are scanning titles, so in order to get them to take the next step and click-through to the full article, the title needs to be short, succinct, and specific. Keywords work better in searches when they’re placed at the beginning of a title. To include keywords that will work in your titles and posts, do a little research on your potential customer base: What are they searching for? What problems do they have and how can you solve them? Use keywords that prove your expertise and are relevant to your content.

VISUALS

It takes more than an exciting title and hook for a post to be truly shareable. Images, infographics, videos, charts and block quotes can shake up a text-based post. Deliver content that offers solutions to your readers’ problems in a creative way that can lead to shares and valuable comments.

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