As a good digital marketer, you already know about the importance of keyword research. However, there’s usually a difference between the types of keywords you’ll use in content marketing and the keywords you’ll use throughout the rest of your site.
Watch A Video Or Read The Full Article Below
In this article, we’ll go over how to determine which types of keywords belong in your blog and which ones should be a part of your main site.
First, if you don’t understand site structure, you might want to watch this video. It will give you a understanding of how to think in segments.
Think in Segments
The first thing you should do is compartmentalize. Think about your site in terms of segments. In this post, we are simplifying a bit and only thinking of the website in two segments. The main site and your content marketing…
First, there’s your blog/article area. That’s the area that you’ll use for content marketing purposes.
Within your blog, you’ll optimize your articles for all sorts of keywords that are closely or even tangentially related to your niche. Each article in your blog should target a subset of people within your market.
Then there’s the rest of the site. That’s where you aggressively market your brand.
Analyzing Keywords For The Main Site
As a rule of thumb, your main site should target service, category, and product-specific keywords. Those are the kinds of keywords that people use when they search for whatever it is your company is offering.
For example, take a look at our own Ignite Visibility website. Better yet, take a look at the keywords that the main site is optimized for.
If you Google “SEO Company,” you’ll see that our site appears on the first page of the search results. That’s because we’ve optimized the site for that keyword.
That makes perfect sense. If companies in the San Diego area are looking for an SEO specialist, we want them to find us. That page is going to have a higher conversion rate than a blog post.
But notice the link on Google. It goes to our home page (sometimes it lists our SEO page and sometimes our service page, Google flip flops it a bit). It doesn’t go to a blog post.
Again, that’s by design. We want people to find our home page when they’re searching for an SEO company in the area. We use that page to market our brand and convince them that we’re the right choice for their SEO needs. The home page is a good option to optimize that term for because it has the most external links pointing at it and that is a competitive term.
But you cannot optimize your home page for everything… Usually, no more than 2 or 3 terms.
So as you can see here, our service pages target other important offers we have.
Each term, has a specific set of service focused keywords associated with it.
Now let’s talk blog…
How to Determine Blog Keywords
The blog is a different story. That’s where we optimize for keywords related to our niche (in this case, digital marketing) but not always direct services we offer. But possibly sub services or an aspect of a service…
For example, people who are interested in online marketing might like to learn about the difference between Amazon Vendor Central and Seller Central. Indeed, we saw an opportunity to rank for “Amazon Vendor Central” and “Amazon Seller Central” keywords and we acted on it.
Now, if you Google “Amazon Vendor Central,” you’ll see that one of our blog posts is sitting pretty at the #3 spot (sometimes #2 spot) in the results list.
So what does that do for us? It draws in an audience of people curious about selling products on Amazon.
The net result: we get a boost to our brand with increased recognition. We also appear as an authority in the digital marketing space.
Here’s another keyword we rank for: “Bing SEO Vs. Google SEO.” We are ranked #1 for this term.
Again, though, the link is to a blog post about how Bing SEO is different from Google SEO.
As with the previous example, the post reaches people in our target market who are looking for info about SEO. Those people might one day become our clients. When people land on this page, we push them to service pages, capture or an email or cookie them for remarketing.
Let’s take a look at one more example: “Guide to Ranking 0.” If you Google that search term, you’ll find that we’re currently at #2 in the results list. If you Google “How to Rank 0,” you’ll find that we’re a little farther down, but still on the first page.
The link is the same in both of those results and it unsurprisingly takes you to a post entitled “The Ultimate Guide to Ranking 0 (Better Than #1)!” That post offers detailed info about how marketers can get a featured snippet in the search results.
As with the other examples, that’s exactly the kind of blog post that will appeal to people in our target market.
Tips for the Blog
As you can see, it’s best to optimize your main site for keywords related to the overall mission of your business. You should optimize blog posts for keywords related to your niche.
Here are a few general pointers about how to use your blog to increase your reach:
- Use general terms – Write up blog posts that will rank for general words and search terms in your space.
- Answer questions – A blog is a great place to answer questions posed by people in your market. Assemble your team together and brainstorm up a series of questions that potential customers might have. Then, create some blog posts that answer those questions.
- Include longtail keywords – The competition out there is stiff. You might find it difficult to rank for “generic” keywords. That’s why you should rank for longtail keywords that your competitors haven’t thought about.
- Target your main service terms on your service pages – When it comes to your money terms, whether it be a service or a product you are trying to sell, make sure it is clear to search engines what page you want to rank for that term. Do you best to target these terms on the pages with the highest potential for conversion, which are usually your category pages on an eCommerce site for general terms and your product pages for product terms. On a service based site, target your main service terms on your landing pages. This differs a bit on news sites, brand sites and information sites.
Get Your Targeting Correct Now
A rookie mistake in digital marketing is to assume that the keywords you’ll rank for in your blog are the same as the keywords you’ll rank for on your main site.
Avoid falling into that trap by segmenting your website and optimizing for the different segments accordingly. It is important to note, that the bigger the website, the more complex this equation gets. But that is the fun of it!
