How to Use Keywords Throughout Your Marketing Strategy

How do you use keywords? If you’re only using them to optimize your website for search, then you’re missing out on many ways to get visibility amongst your target audience. In this post, I’m going to share with you the best ways to use keywords across your entire online (and even offline) marketing strategy in the market.

Using Keywords throughout your Market Strategy

Webpage optimization

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this one, especially since you can read all about it in the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. But just for a quick review, here are the places that you should use your target keyword phrase on each page of your website that you’d like to optimize for search.

• In the SEO title tag of your page (or just the main title of the page if your CMS does not allow you to edit SEO fields). This is a requirement for the on-page optimization of a keyword.
• In the meta description for your page. Even though it may not count for optimization purposes, it will get bolded when someone sees your webpage in search results for that keyword.
• At least one image’s filename and ALT text.
• In the first paragraph on the page.
• In a few places throughout the content on the page in a natural way.

Now, let’s look at more ways you can utilize your keywords beyond simple website optimization. Try to stick to your marketing strategy as much as you can.

Content topic development

If you are developing content (blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc.) in order to get more visibility in search, then you’ll want to create content that’s based on keyword phrases that people are searching for. There are two ways to go about this.

First, you can create great pieces of content with only your readers in mind. Once you’ve created your content, you can go back, find the keyword phrases that fit best, and optimize that content accordingly using the webpage optimization steps I’ve listed above.

Second, you can research keywords for your industry, determine which ones would make for great content, and use those as a basis for your topic ideas. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a website about dog training. If you search this on Google AdWords Keyword Planner, you can download 801 suggested keyword phrases, all with estimated search volume.

Take your downloaded spreadsheet and turn it into a content topic idea generator using the keywords that best fit your content goals. Content optimization is an important part of your marketing strategy.

Expand your spreadsheet to include additional notes about your topic idea, the content type you want to create (blog post, podcast, video, etc.), the best person to create the content, and much more. You can then use this spreadsheet to create content that you know your audience wants.

With this approach, you can use keywords to plan your content strategy, a side benefit of which will be creating content that has the potential to drive lots of organic search traffic to your website.

Branding

Do you want to create a strong brand for yourself or your business? If so, you need to think of the one keyword phrase that sums up your core offering and make sure it’s what you use everywhere you go, online and offline. I don’t mean in the anchor text kind of way, but in more of a “I am a freelance writer” or “Moz is a marketing analytics software” kind of way.

This will help you brand yourself or your business by what you want to be known for. When people ask who you are or what your business does, you’ll have a consistent answer, eliminating any confusion. You don’t want to be the subject of conversations. Where one person believes you’re a web designer, while another thinks you’re an SEO consultant. Regardless of what’s true, both people will end up confused as to whether they’re discussing the same person.

Once you have that one defining keyword phrase, you will definitely want to use it for the following:

Social media profile optimization

Want to increase the likelihood that people will find your social profiles and pages on social networks? Keywords are the answer. You aren’t optimizing your social profiles and pages for your target keyword phrase. You may be missing out on the customers who are searching for you within each social network.

While you can’t optimize the “SEO title” field for your profiles and pages. Those are reserved for your name or your business name. You can optimize other key elements within your profiles and pages with your target keywords and phrases. These include the following:

• Twitter profiles, make sure your keyword phrase is in your bio.
• Facebook pages, make sure your keyword phrase is in your page’s “Category,” “Short Description,” and “Long Description,” all of which can be edited on your page’s “About” tab.
• Pinterest profiles, make sure your keyword phrase is in your profile’s “About You” box.
• Instagram profiles, make sure your keyword phrase is in your bio.
• LinkedIn profiles, make sure your keyword phrase is in your professional headline, current job title, summary, skills, and other applicable sections throughout your profile.
• LinkedIn company pages, make sure your keyword phrase is in your company description, company specialties, and company industry (if possible).
• Google+ profiles, make sure your keyword phrase is in your tagline, introduction, occupation, and skills.
• Google+ pages, make sure your keyword phrase is in your introduction (story) and category (if possible).

As with any other webpage, you shouldn’t overstuff your social profiles and pages with keywords. Doing so can cause visitors to assume you’re a spammer and move on. But adding your main keywords and phrases in a natural way to the above areas. It should help you rank better in searches on each respective network. Try to incorporate the possible to your marketing strategy.

If you’re not sure how to best utilize your keyword phrase in your social media bios, look towards your competitors. Analyze each of their top social profiles to see what keyword phrase they use most. You can also use tools like Rival IQ to get a quick overview of their bios for faster analysis.

Social media update optimization

In addition to your profiles and pages, your social media updates themselves can be optimized with keywords. Most of the benefit will be seen on social search within each respective network. It never hurts to think about keyword optimization so your social updates can be found on Google search. For instance, these tweets for current events:

Reblogged from www.moz.com