Keyword Planner: 9 Hacks for Content Marketing

Keywords are not the end in creating online content. In case of content marketing, you should think about your reader first and foremost. Otherwise, you won’t be creating the content necessary to stand out to your audience.

If you use keywords correctly, you use the voice of your customers and target audience. Keyword research allows you to target your message and stand out in your industry.

While the importance of keyword research has remained steady, the methods have evolved in concert with more intelligent search engines and changing user preference.

Selecting and incorporating the right keywords into every landing page and post you publish can open the floodgates to more prospects, possibilities, and sales for your business.

Here are 9 tips you could use to make the reach of your content ominipresent—

Keyword Planner Tip #1: Form a List of Rich Keywords

Your foundational keywords are the ones that align closely with your target phrase. These keywords give the rest of your content meaning and structure. Without them, it is difficult to do any other keyword research that is even moderately effective or lucrative.

If you are not sure what your foundational keywords are, write the most basic queries your customers would use to find your company’s products or services. These base keywords will be used to develop more advanced keyword ideas

Keyword Planner Tip #2: Use tools such as Google auto-suggest

Auto-suggest is a simple and effective way to figure out which keywords you should target. Google’s auto-suggest feature is used to learn the keywords used more frequently by searchers.

While auto-suggest is not the most significant thing of keyword research, it can help you use overlooked keyword phrases or parallel phrases you had not considered earlier or missed.

You can also perform a search and see similar searches recommended by Google. As soon as someone starts typing a keyword into Google, the search engine begins suggesting ways to complete it.

As users interact with these auto-completions, search results are instantly altered as well. You could take the keywords you’ve come up with so far and simply type them into Google.

Keyword Planner Tip #3: Perfect and prioritize best keywords

The distinction of keyword is necessary. The keywords that have the highest monthly search volume, cost-per-click, and a competitive density are the best.

The way that you prioritize your keywords will depend largely on how you want to influence search results.

Strong keyword research allows you to correctly prioritize content. It can inform your editorial calendar, as you’ll have a reasonable idea of what content is most in demand and when it is likely to deliver the greatest impact on your business goals.

Keyword Planner Tip #4: Survey Your Users

Keyword research and analysis helps you to understand your prospective customers. By knowing what search terms they use to find your product or service offerings, you gain insight into their needs and desires — what problems they want solved, what they expect to find on a destination website and so on.

While many marketers primarily focus on keyword research, few think to ask their customers what search queries they are using to find the products, goods, and services.

You gain an instant insight into which keywords you should target. When your content is designed to match user intent, you will grab attention instantly — and retain it for as long as you meet your visitor’s unspoken needs.

Keyword Planner Tip #5: Use Keyword Data from Your Competitors

Tools like SEMRush are best known for giving marketers keyword domain ranks according to Google data.

This information can be helpful in choosing which keywords to target and where you’re going to diverge from your competition.

Using SEMRush, you can evaluate which keywords are performing well in your industry and decide whether to add them to your keyword research strategy. You could choose from a variety of tools available to spy on your competitors’ keywords— Moz, SimilarWeb, SpyFu etc.

You could also check your competitors’ social media accounts. Or you could put to work another method of tracking your competitors’ links. Content marketing is often done in unison with link building.

Keyword Planner Tip #6: Write for Humans

Building content that is based around relevant topics, important themes, and valuable information for your audience works the best.

Because of this, today’s content creator can afford to focus less on keyword phrases and more on context and relevance.

Your communication will be more effective, targeted and specific. Your content can be crafted in a manner such that a reader intuitively feels that you are “speaking their language.” You develop empathy more easily, you connect more deeply & engage with more sincerity.

Convince, educate, inform and guide more meaningfully. And all of this happens because you meet the user where they are at the moment and lead them towards a destination that you know they want to reach.

You can construct content that perfectly targets your message while appealing to visitors who use specific search terms to find you.

When your message is so finely targeted at a particular interest group or niche audience, it becomes very effective at getting prospects to do what you want. Conversion rates are higher. Marketing expenses go down.

Keyword Planner Tip #7: Do something new/beyond relevant

Aim at creating amazing content, the kind that makes your website the ultimate destination for your audience.

To win at SEO, your content should go above and beyond that of your competitors, anticipating any and all questions a visitor might have and answering those questions fully.

An excellent content strategy will force people to remember you. It is good for branding.

Others may even link to your content; if you’re lucky, you’ll receive high-quality backlinks from authority websites in your niche, including newspapers, industry leading sites and thought leaders who will share it on social media.

All this improves your SEO and drives more free traffic your way.

Keyword Planner Tip #8: Choose Audience-driven Topics

Become familiar with the specific challenges your audience is facing. As you interact on social media, interview your sales team, and field questions in webinars, keep tabs on recurring topics your company has the expertise to address.

This part of the process does not need to be elaborate or time-consuming. You could keep running lists of themes and notes in Google Docs, or something similar.

Viewing common conversations in one central location will help you identify particular keywords and phrases your target audience is actually using.

Keep an eye on what’s trending, what is going viral, amount of public response to something.

Keyword Planner Tip #9: Get Customer Feedback

Content marketing should be "customer-centric". One of the best ways to know what content you should create is to find out from your customers.

There are a number of ways to go about asking, whether it’s through customer surveys, social media, or just giving them a phone call.

Listen to what they have to say, and jot down some unique ideas or suggestions that you might have missed yourself. There is a great probability of you being surprised by their ideas.

This is why even the big houses in any sphere of business also seek customer feedback because they always aim at improving and thus excelling.

Keyword research has the capacity to help get your content in front of more marketing leads than you may have ever thought possible.

Find out what your audience wants and which words they use. Then use this information to select the keywords that hold the most value for your content marketing strategy.