August 6, 2018

3.5 : Develop keyword plan for a campaign

3.5 : Develop keyword plan for a campaign

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

Once you’ve identified that you will have a specific campaign that will have a specific objective and specific target audience or specific interactions with the buyer persona, you have to think about what are the most appropriate keywords that you will be using.

With this in mind, you will be going through the same process of trying to identify the most relevant questions that individuals will be facing at that decision point. So, for example, if it is a new product launch, the questions will be surrounding what the product is, what the features of that particular product are compared to some of the competitors.

Whereas if it is a sales-related campaign where, for example, you have a particular period or for example, Ramadan is an approach and you are trying to target Muslim customers in that area, you are then trying to integrate those particular keywords in your campaign as well.

So these keywords that will be grouped into a campaign will also help you to develop a theme for the communications and messages that you have. So it is great for you to try and think about audio, videos, images, and written text that will be supporting those particular keywords.

A campaign should have a range of keywords on a particular theme, released through different media on different platforms at different times

So if you are developing a campaign, bear in mind that one particular keyword is not enough, a group and a theme of keywords will be associated with the activities that you have, and those should be all integrated into different content areas that you have as well.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

We use keyword plans within our different projects to make sure that we are focusing the actual content that we produce on those different keywords so that we can maximize the response from the actual search engines themselves once the actual campaign is live, but we don’t specifically write and gage and gear content specifically or purely for those different keywords that exist because otherwise, it becomes unreadable and it doesn’t become a good user experience for the reader and isn’t natural in any way.

Keyword plans are important but when it comes to content the human reader takes priority

So, although we do keep in the back of our minds the keyword results and the different search volumes that exist, we don’t let it dictate the content that we put together for our site, we keep it as user-friendly, as readable, informative, interesting, and topical as we possibly can.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

We like to plan within a year so especially for content, it’s really important to know what are the name days or day offs and special events.

Everything is based on content, so grouping similar keywords and themes in different ad groups are the only way, not only to actually reach the consumer, but it helps you to understand how it works and create a better reporting system.

Keyword plans help to group terms based on products or services

For example, we have in this shop I told before, with gardening tools we have potteries, handmade, and we have let’s say gardening tools for outdoor activities. So grouping in different themes based on your products, then going to the keyword tool trying to find search queries and, after that, again examining if you have all of this content to your landing page. So Google is starting with relevance, trying to find if the query someone is looking for is in your ad, and after that, again, it’s in the content of your landing page which usually it’s the site.

Exercise

Using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program that you can install locally on your PC, Mac or Linux machine which analyses and crawls websites links, images from an SEO perspective.

It fetches key onsite elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type and allows you to filter for common SEO issues, or slice and dice the data however you see fit, by exporting into Excel.

The video below provides a demonstration of what this SEO tool can do –

The free version is limited in terms of number of web pages you can crawl over but you are able to get it here and install it on your computer http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

This is for advanced students only who want to challenge themselves

This is an advanced tool and only if you feel eager to experiment, carry on with the rest of this exercise – install Screaming Frog and analyse a website of your choice – export the pages into excel and create an updated Keyword Plan.

Organic SEO – Keyword Plan Development Process

Stage One – Gathering Information
1. Crawl/Look at Your Website (you can use Screaming Frog) to get a bird’s eye view of how many pages there are to optimise and how content is grouped/structured.
2. Look at your website (if socks get 1,000,000 searches and t-shirts get 100,000 searches, but you have 5 sock products and 50 t-shirt products – you may want to focus more on optimising for t-shirts)
3. Create a skeleton keyword map (see the example excel sheet) for all pages you want to optimise (you can go as granular as you want with this).
4. Download search query data from Search Console.
5. Download any search query reports from AdWords (if you have done any campaigns in the past).
6. If your website has a search function, look at what people are searching for on your site.

Stage Two – Research
7. Look through the data from Search Console, AdWords & Site Search and segment any potential keywords for optimisation on pages in the keyword map and any potential keywords that could be used to generate blog/FAQ content.
8. Research keywords on Google Keyword Planner on a page-by-page basis using any keywords identified in point 7, and any logical combinations based on the page content e.g. ‘Nike womens t-shirts’.

Stage 3 – Building the Keyword Plan
9. Identify & prioritise the best keywords for each page based on relevance & search volume and add to the keyword map.
10. Create Keyword Optimised Title in the format “target phrase(s) | brand name” for each page. Remember:
a. Write the title to be appealing to users to improve click-through rate.
b. Keep the title to 55 characters or fewer to minimise the risk of cut-off.
11. Create a keyword optimised meta description for each page. Remember:
a. Write the description to be engaging & informative to be useful to the searcher.
b. Include a Call To Action (CTA) to improve click-through rate.
c. Keep the description to 155 characters or less to minimise the risk of cut-off.
12. Create keyword optimised Heading 1 (H1) tag for each page. Remember:
a. Keep the title short and specific to the purpose of the page – do not keyword stuff
b. Place the target phrase as close to the beginning of the heading as possible

Additional material

Analysing your SEO

There are a number of tools that can help you to analyse a website’s performance in terms of its SEO.

Have a look at some of these options:

Google Search Console

If you have a website – link it up to Google Search Console

SEOBook have a list

Found SEO tool

Additional SEO tools to consider

The 8-Step SEO Strategy

 https://moz.com/blog/the-8step-seo…

Google Search Console

 https://support.google.com/webmast…

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

 http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo…

Pleae see chapter 3 links below:

3.0 Buyer persona development
3.1 The importance of understanding who the target audience is
3.2 Planning integration of search and social media
3.3 Keyword research for buyer persona
3.4 Social media channels for buyer persona
3.6 PPC keyword vs organic keyword plan
3.7 Develop social media editorial calendar