Building Your Keyword Universe

Two tactics for determining the content that makes up your online business

The way you envision the content on your website may not be the way your prospective audience members search for that content online.

Sure, some of your main terms might relate to what people are searching for, since they are likely broader terms, but secondary keyword phrases might be a place where you can pick up more traffic.

For instance, one of our keyword clusters in our Keyword Universe is the term “Content Marketing”. With all of the popularity surrounding content marketing these days, the main term is very competitive. Many bloggers and marketers write optimized pieces and publish them to the web each day. Since we don’t cover content marketing daily, it’s hard for us to rank as high as some on this term.

However, since we are an educational consultancy group, we focus on processes and strategies often. One of our secondary keyword terms within the Content Marketing cluster is the term “Content Marketing Strategy”. This term describes a process, includes actionable tasks that we teach clients and likely targets our direct audience the best.

For the term Content Marketing Strategy we rank on page-one in Google, and when potential audience members come to our website through that term, they are people who want to learn the actual strategies behind online content marketing so that they can help their business succeed. These are the exact people we want to visit our site, become registered members and pay for the valuable content we can offer on the topic.

Below I’ve listed some ways to discover additional keyword phrases you may have missed while creating a Keyword Universe. Remember, secondary phrases can be very beneficial in gaining more traffic, and some of that traffic may be more direct and appeal to your core audience better than you expect.

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5 ways to determine relevant keywords

#1 – Editors and Expert Knowledge – Have a meeting with your content producers, editors and all employees that understand your core content. Have these individuals brainstorm in order to determine any possible keywords your Keyword Universe is lacking.

#2 – Competitors Websites – All online publishers and content producers should know who their biggest competitors are. Go to the websites of your biggest competitors and pay close attention to the source code, topics they cover and search tags. Many of these pieces of content will relate to your audience as well.

#3 – Google – The search giant has a few different tools you can use to find related keywords. These include the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Wonderwheel. Enter your keywords into these Google tools and it will retrieve new potential keyword phrases for you.

#4 – Compete.com – If you use Compete.com this website can be a valid source for keyword phrases. To use it, enter your website and take a look at the Top Search Terms and the Top Referral Sites sections. These will both include relevant keyword phrases, and additional sites you can look at for competing terms.
#5 – Analytics – Use your analytics program to see how many total visits search engines sent via your keywords. This way you can identify your top keywords and use the other strategies mentioned above to elaborate on those terms.

The Keyword Universe is a key step to success for online content-based businesses. To learn more about increasing traffic, conversions and revenue, join us on January 11 for our SEO Campaign Management 2011 webinar

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