Create valuable content and your customers will thank you. Create content that is valuable and visible and you’ll land more customers. Finding the “right” content for your blog is critical to generating visibility and building business. So how does one create the most effective content for a company’s blog? The answer may lie in your keywords.
At last week’s BlogWorld 2010, we collected some great tips from Top Rank Marketing’s Lee Odden (and a few others) to help you harness those keywords and take your content-marketing strategy to the next level.
Develop personas
Who are your customers? Odden suggests marketers define a variety of personas and build keyword lists around each of them. Marketing products to technology professionals? Isolate a chief technology officer in a given industry and build keyword lists around him/her. Then move to network admins in another industry and create a new set for them.
Research keywords in places you might not think to look
There are a variety of places to go and find the keywords that will affect your content strategy. Many marketers use free tools such as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery to help find variations of the core keywords they have already identified. Take that a step further and move to social spaces to gather keywords being discussed by your target audience(s). Sites such as 48ers.com and SocialMention are great places to start your hunt across the social Web. After taking a look at competitor’s keywords (with sites like SEMrush.com), Odden suggests marketers look in the mirror at their own sites and blogs. Not only should marketers pay attention to inbound search terms, but the searched terms from your own site can pay huge dividends. Are you creating the content that your customers are asking you for? Deliver and they’ll reward you by sharing and expanding your visibility.
Educate your authors
The nuts and bolts of content creation can (and often will) define your visibility. Whether you’re creating the content , or you have writers for your blog, it’s important to implement SEO basics. To start, make sure your title features the crucial keywords and tells the right story. While we all like to be clever, Odden reminds us that “search engines don’t understand puns or metaphors.”
Authors and editors must also realize that keywords in the URL and throughout the post are crucial. Feeling redundant? Synonyms are an equally important part of the SEO equation, so use them often.
Use outposts for coordinated efforts
In another BlogWorld 2010 session focusing on social media for B-to-B companies, Kirsten Watson, director of corporate marketing at Kinaxis, showcased a keyword implementation strategy worth noting. Each month, Kinaxis chooses one critical keyword and creates a lead-generation white paper on that subject. To generate awareness of this white paper, the team creates blog posts on (or around) that particular keyword, offering opportunities to download the full white paper. There are video interviews created on YouTube and presentations uploaded to SlideShare, as well as posted to staff members’ LinkedIn accounts, all tagged appropriately and focusing on the keyword of the month.
The results? Kinaxis has enjoyed a 270% increase in traffic to its domain and a 320% increase in leads generated online since kicking off the social campaigns.
Image credit: lambada, via iStockphoto
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While I agree with the overall ideas presented here one must not forget to write for humans too. Its too easy to get carried away writing for the search engines, before you know it what you've written is meaningless to your audience.
Great point– and one that Lee Odden did mention in his presentation. You ultimately have to write for your audience– but if you can blend smart SEO practices (like keyword integration) and quality content, you're in business.
Another thing to mention to your writers is alt text for images – our bloggers know to write descriptive alt text that includes helpful synonyms as well to help with SEO in their posts.
Yes, the images are key– and also can impact visibility in a positive manner via image search. Good call!
You provide some very interesting information here that I would like to apply to my companies' blog, which is geared towards the high technology B2B community (http://inmedialog.com). In developing personas, you recommend that we should isolate key people in a given industry and build keyword lists around them. Could you please tell me more about this process regarding the types of keywords that should be used? For instance, is it helpful to mention newsworthy people or products, or will this result in a blog post buried under a sea of similar posts?
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Creating user personas is key. This is a strategy I implemented at a B2B software firm and it has helped tremendously when creating content. Because we know who we are targeting, and writing for, it becomes easier to create relevant content for the right audience.
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Content is king. The more the valuable your content is, the more that it will attract more customers. The more the customers, the more that your business will grow. Thanks for sharing this kind of information.
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[...] To take a corporate blog to the next level, it’s vital to use keywords effectively, says Top Rank Marketing’s Lee Odden. Design a list of keywords tailored to your ideal customer, then use SEO basics to ensure that your posts and headlines feature your target words as prominently as possible. Clever turns of phrase may look impressive, Odden notes, but “search engines don’t understand puns or metaphors.” SmartBrief/SmartBlog on Social Media [...]
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