How to Create Keyword Targeted Content connect you with Customers
My suggestion out of the gate is to break your strategy down into two activities; I’ll call them building and targeting. A useful analogy here is a snow ball fight. You need to not only be making snowballs but your need to be throwing them. Failing at either means game over. Or put it other terms you need to not only be creating amazing content but your need to be sharing and targeting customers with it.
Keyword Driven Content Development
Building content should always begin with your end in mind. For a search or social campaign this typically is authority on a topic and a corresponding set of keywords. For instance I may want to become the authority on how to generate more leads online and be able to identify several obvious terms people would use when searching for this such as “lead generation companies”. These terms are the starting point in the journey. With them in hand you are able to build a more comprehensive list. There are a variety of ways to do this however I would strongly suggest reverse engenering this list buy creating a campaign in Google Adwords.
Use Adwords for Keywords Research
Working with Adwords right out the gate is useful for a number of reasons. The obvious is that it understands all of the related key terms and pushes you to advertise on topics that you should likely be creating content about anyways. I find it the keyterms generated by adwords a great way to get a lay of the land and understanding of what topics are worth pursuing.
You can start this process almost immediately before you have even created a single page on your site. While possible I would suggest starting by creating one page that is your best attempt at talking to your customer about the topic. Use this page to create the adwords campaign. The combination of your several know keywords in addition to the content on the page will result in lists of suggested keyterms in addition to categories.
Both the list and categories are important. The categories are important becouse that is how google see’s those sets of keyterms as related. The terms are important because each one of them Google sees as being related to your identified terms and page topic. Put simply Google thinks people interested in your topic would likely use these terms or related terms to find you.
Use Moz for Competitor Research
The next step is to figure out if you can even rank on these terms or if it is worth competing on these terms organically or in the paid results. While there are a variety of options I would strongly suggest Moz.com. Submitting your list of terms into the diffuculty checker will allow to sort the low hanging fruit from the harder keywords to pursue.
Once you have identified the terms that can be competed on the next step is to create keyword target pages for each of the keyterms. These are landing pages that should not only cover your take on the topic but the topic more broadly. These are considered “landing pages” becouse these are the pages that people directly land on from a SERP.
Create Landing Pages for All Major Keywords
Back to the snow ball fight analogy. The more your landing page content relates to your target audiences needs the easier time you will have connecting with them. Create content that does not relate to the terms used to find your service and you may as well be throwing snowballs at yourself.
The landing page is the beginning of any funnel. You need to create landing pages for all your major keywords for a variety of reasons such as:
- They are critical for lowing your CPC in Adwords
2. It ensures search engine view your as about your sought after terms
3. If helps build your organic traffic and page authority on related and targeted terms
While critical, landing pages are not, and should not used as the place to get customers to provide their information or make a call. Trying to drive a conversion directly on a landing page is bad for a number or reasons.
Landing Pages are not Conversion Pages
For one conversion pages often have a higher bounce rate. This is bad for SEO business as customers bouncing on landing pages means to google that your page is not a great result for the topic. Moreover conversion pages are typically designed to squeeze customers and accordingly have limited options and links other than the main call to action. This severely undermines your ability to cross link your keyword targeted pages in categories. This is a must for your site to show authority on a topic from an on-page SEO perspective. I will also add that ranking pages often contain a ton of relavent content that while good for SEO can be bad for conversions.
A Landing Pages Goal is a Low Bounce Rate
All that to say, when creating landing pages the only goal is to get customers to click through to a page deeper in the funnel. The pages that lay between landing and conversion pages are called a variety of things. I like to think of them as lead warmers. They are in place to preframe the customer for the ensuing pitch as much as they are there to drive traffic to conversion.
Landing pages should be topographical in nature. They are in place to offer customers the opportunity to navigate to other pages which will provide them with the information they are looking for and which would be required for them to reach out to you. They are the modern version of a home page. This is where customer are first encountering your brand and as such they need to be direct them to the resources which you have on the topic which they found you when looking for.
Creating Educational or Lead Warming Pages
At the heart of any site that is pumping our leads is a handful of pages that serve to warm up a customer. These pages are in place to clearly convey your companies differentiating value proposition and topic authority. Among other things these pages should build buyer confidence, preframe potential customers and educate prospects on the points you feel are key to making an informed decision in your space. There are typically 4 to 8 of these pages per service or topic that cover the key aspects of your service and offering. Customers typically visit several of these pages before deciding to take the next step.
While often forgotten these intermediate pages are key to higher conversion rates on close pages and close rates on inquiries. Because these pages are all linked to from all of your landing pages they often are your top ranking pages in search engines. As a consequence perfecting your presence on these pages is key to success online.
Squeeze or Conversion Pages
Last but not least is the ever talked about conversion pages. These pages are the final step and are critical to turning your clicks into conversions. The emphasis often placed by online marketers is on aestics. While important the size and placement of your form and call to action is just the start. Definitely abide by best practices but critically consider if you are actually conveying the authority and information required for a customer to feel confident in choosing your service or product. I can’t tell you how many pages I have come across with flawless adherence to design rules and absolutely nothing to say that speaks to why they deserve my interest or business.
Wider Funnels : LIFT Model
By far the most succinct explanation of this need is given by Wider Funnels in their brief of their LIFT Model. The model focuses on six conversion factors; value proposition, clarity, relevance, distraction, urgency, and anxiety. According to wider funnels “An optimized conversion path will have a clear value proposition, an appropriate sense of urgency, bring clarity to message and actions required, and have high relevance to the user. Great sites also reduce distraction and lower anxiety.”
Delivery, Attribution and Lean Lead Generation
Assuming you have got developing content sorted the question returns to delivery. How should one approach it and why is attribution a key to success in delivery. My suggestion out the gate is to always focus on paid. The reason is that it provides instant feed back. There is no point in spending weeks or months developing your position on SERP (or search engine result pages) if the resulting traffic does not convert. Put otherwise it is much cheaper to buy some traffic to test your funnel than build a funnel based on an untested hypothesis.
I will explore this topic in depth in later posts. For now best of luck in your search for more leads on-line. As always feel free to reach out to me.
