How to Use Keywords Effectively in B2B Inbound Marketing
A lot of the questions we get asked are around how to use keywords effectively in B2B Inbound Marketing. Effective use of Keywords on your blog, website and content should be high up your list of priorities.
In marketing terms, Google defines a keyword as "a word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content of a document."
Keywords are the terms your potential buyer will be using when they ask Google questions that are related to your product/service area. So, if you searched, ‘How do I use keywords effectively in Inbound Marketing’, that would be a long-tail keyword (See below. Essentially a keyword phrase).
This article will focus on how to use long-tail keywords effectively in B2B inbound marketing.
To generate better quality leads online you need your Inbound Marketing to be very targeted. A good place to start is by looking at your existing keywords and find out how they are being ranked by search engines. This will give you an idea of how likely it is that a potential customer will be able to find a web page, article or blog post centred around a particular keyword. The best known of these is Moz Keyword Explorer. You can try this tool for free so it’s a good option. The Keyword Explorer gives you a range of statistics for the keyword you have entered. These are Volume, Difficulty, Opportunity and Potential. You can also use the tool to get keyword suggestions and SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) analysis for a particular keyword.
For a more in-depth look at keyword ranking HubSpot offers a range of Search Engine Optimisation tools which include keyword suggestions, ranking and analysis.
Once you have reviewed your existing keywords (and revised them), you will want to create some new ones. Any keywords you create should be based on the needs of your Buyer Personas and where they are in the Buyer’s Journey. They should also be long-tail keywords.
A long-tail keyword is a phrase of three or more words that your intended audience is likely to include in a web search. For example, if you are a sports’ clothing retailer a standard keyword could be "sportswear", but a long tail keyword may be "best sportswear for cold weather" or even more specifically "best waterproof sportswear for cold weather." The phrase should be specific to the content you are writing. Using long-tail keywords helps you target the correct audience (your buyer personas), attract those prospects to your website and ultimately generate better quality leads online.
There are several keyword search tools available, Google AdWords has a Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool is another that is commonly used.
Once you have decided on the new keywords you want, use a ranking tool, as you did for your existing keywords. Ideally, you want a term that is searched frequently, but that has a low difficulty score. The low difficulty score is particularly important, as you want the content that you are publishing to be easily found.
Placing your keyword so it is available to search engines is essential to being ranked and ultimately found by your intended audience. Five helpful places to locate your keyword are:-
- Page title
- URL
- Title of the article/content
- Alt text on an image
- At least once in the body of the text
After all of your hard work researching and placing the keyword onto your site/content, it helps to know how it is performing for you. This is where keyword monitoring comes in. There are various tools out there that can help you do this. Most of these tools you will need to pay for, but they generally offer a free trial period, so you can see what works. The advantage of using a monitoring tool is that you can see where your keywords are ranking and if they are driving traffic to your site. Keep on eye on future posts for suggestions on the best Keyword Monitoring tools.
Following the above steps will help you to use keywords effectively in B2B inbound marketing.
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