Next Steps After Discovering SEO Keywords

When it comes to digital marketing, an essential part of having an effective strategy is understanding the power of what SEO can do. Little do marketers know, SEO keywords is one of best kept secrets when it comes to driving customers to your business.

In order to see success through your marketing funnel, the first step is building a sophisticated keyword strategy to market, the modern way.

Categorize Your Keywords

Brand – For most companies, the majority of organic search traffic will come in through their own brand name as a search term. While this may not be as helpful towards your content strategy, tracking all of the derivatives people use to search your brand will be helpful when creating paid ads.

Influencers – Leads look for thought leaders when it comes to purchasing decisions. So ask yourself, who are the thought leaders in your industry? Influencers and keywords are an autocatalytic cycle and searching keywords will help you when you’re looking for influencers. When it comes to discovering new industry keywords, finding influencers is one of the best sources to use.

Industry – When it comes to your specific industry, these keywords are probably focused on top-of-funnel cliché’ buzzwords that are quite broad. But hey, you might as well generate as many leads as you can from them, right? Using these keywords will indicate leads in the exploration and education stage.

Competitors – Users will still find ways to stumble across your site when searching for your competitors or related solutions. A great tip to drive more SEO traffic is creating comparison blog posts, which will have keywords to track target leads across other channels.

Solution – People use keywords because they are actively trying to find a solution to a problem. For search engines, solution- or product-focused keywords are often the most valuable. These keywords are best broken out into focused groupings such as product feature, use case or key benefits.

The Action

You’ve done your keyword mapping and created your categories, so now it’s time to take action.

People tend to track keywords to inform their website design and content strategy, yet fail to see that keyword marketing is so much more than optimization. To be effective in all aspects, you must find creative ways to personalize your marketing and form a proactive strategy.

Creating different landing pages for each keyword group and listening for keyword usage in other channels (such as social media), can help increase conversion rates. Use your SEO keywords in your paid advertising channels, driving industry and influencer keywords to content and brand and solution keywords to your landing page.

For example, in this white paper on lead scoring, Socedo recommends treating social media keywords as lead activities. Anyone Tweeting, posting, or sharing one of your strategic keywords is a potential lead because they are actively expressing interest in this topic.

If you include SEO keywords in your lead scoring model, include social keywords along the same line. Additionally, reach out proactively to your target leads when they use a high-value keyword.

Always Follow Up

Your keyword strategy doesn’t just apply to inbound marketing, but it’s all about the outreach that comes with it. Following up with your leads based on keyword usage will help you understand what your leads want and how you can give it to them.

Here are a few tips how:

• Sales teams love small talk, especially when it’s meaningful. Create a list of the keywords your sales leads are using, then use one as a catalyst for the next sales call. “Hey! I saw your tweet on content marketing yesterday. Let’s talk about that…”
• For leads who find your business by searching industry terms, place them into an email nurture program with top-funnel content and guide them through the buyer’s journey
• Stay engaged with your leads on social media and communicate with them because if you aren’t, you bet your competitor is. Track mentions of your competitors on social and make sure your social team starts a friendly conversation with them.
• If someone is talking about an influencer, they probably are interested in what the influencer has to say and the content related to them. Don’t miss the chance to send them an article or webinar, mentioning your brand of course.

While these aren’t the only ways to take action after discovering your keywords, we hope that it sparks your brain into thinking of new ideas on how to utilize your target phrases. So apply those keywords, track your lead behavior and get to driving that traffic!

Teena Thach is Socedo’s social media and marketing specialist. Socedo helps sales and marketing professionals leverage social media data to discover, qualify, and nurture leads, automatically.