Are you an inbound marketer? If Yes, then the term “Keyword” becomes like a daily word which you use. How well do you know your keywords? Doesn’t it amaze you how google shows website results completely relevant to your search terms? Keywords are like pillars which provide strength to your online presence. And they also have a dollar value attached to them.
$ Value of a Keyword
Visitor → Lead → Customer. I am sure this sequence is clear to you.For some customers, Keywords are the first starting points. Thus, keywords are valuable. They generate revenue for your business. Let us quickly understand how.
If a user types a keyword, for now, let’s just say it as “HubSpot Partner”. There is a good chance that the Znbound website is shown on the Google’s 1st page amongst the top results. User clicks on the URL. Becomes a visitor and then fills up a form on the landing page. Becomes a lead. And eventually, becomes a customer. And Znbound makes revenue. So this keyword has helped in generating revenue which means that there is an economic value for this keyword.
Most of us inbound marketers know how to go about identifying such keywords. Right?
Watch out for a future blog post in which estimate dollar value of some important keywords that Znbound has worked on}
Finding Keywords
It begins with Keyword Research. If you are like us, your go-to tool would be Google Keyword Planner. Basis the seed keywords, keyword planner generates a dump of many many keywords. Then the painful task of finding the 'most relevant' keywords begins.
Prioritizing Keywords
Prioritizing keyword is very necessary in order to align your goals with keyword strategy. Planning and execution of keyword research is a crucial part of SEO Strategy and it's a tedious process too. You need to understand your business completely in order to select the keywords because these keywords help you in improving your website organic traffic. Choose the keywords which are high volume and can create business for you, in short, those keywords should represent buying intent.
After performing keyword research, SEO executives might come up with one of the following scenarios.
- 100 + keywords
- < 100 keywords
- Very few keywords
And then they start executing. This immediate step into execution may not be the most logical step. These prioritized keywords should be further pruned down to what we like to call, 'HERO Keywords'.
For that, we turn to 'Pareto'.
80% of the search volume tends to come from only 20% or less of the keywords selected. Keywords which result in 80% of your total volume are your 'HERO Keywords'. It is baffling that inbound marketers do not accord 'HERO' status to their important keywords. The reasons might be as under.
- HERO keyword thinking missing - I bet this may sound like a new concept for the SEO Strategy.
- Wrong Long Tail strategy - Creating a list of long tail keywords and publishing around those keywords topic is natural when starting off. And search engines like Google algorithm might also reward it. But, such long tail keywords would have limited search volume. What stops from attacking your main keywords which have significant search volume?
- Fear - Top SERP positions are dominated by strong websites that have been getting user love for years. It is ok to feel daunted. Your optimized keywords might not get upward movement. But why give up without a shot?
You need to think why you are choosing the keywords. Ranking for a particular keyword isn’t a one-time effort. You can’t directly climb a mountain without a proper thinking and strategy. Once you reach the pinnacle you are stable but on the way to the peak you need to foresee the path completely in order to achieve it. And HERO keywords can give you that perspective.
Let's go and climb some mountains.
