Senior Marketing Advanced Masterclass Series Part 11: Boosting Your Keyword Capabilities

Most online entrepreneurs know about the importance of keyword usage in their business and they do the minimal amount necessary to have a starting point to work from.

But you have to know more than basic keywords and where to use them in your online business. Even with the best free or paid keyword tools, you’ll need to adopt a strategy to maximize your return for those efforts.

You have to look at keywords as more than search terms. They’re a way to help your customers navigate and engage with your content. They can be used in free and paid marketing.

In terms of SEO (search engine optimization), it’s these upper level strategies that will determine whether or not your site is truly competitive. Even using specific keywords on social media as hashtags can play a role in widening your audience and ultimately, your profits.

With advanced keyword capabilities, you’ll not only harness a more targeted audience, but your products will be capable of converting better thanks to your use of keywords as insight into buyer behavior and intent.

Leveraging Keywords Based on User Intent

When you begin studying keyword research as an online entrepreneur, you’re going to hear certain phrases thrown around, such as keyword clusters, user intent, and more. User intent is one of the most important concepts to understand with your keyword capabilities because it tells you exactly why someone is typing that word or phrase into a search engine or elsewhere to find information.

User intent is typically divided up into informational, navigational, and transactional. Sometimes there is an additional concept known as commercial research. With informational keywords, the user is simply trying to gain more insight about a topic.

A navigational keyword phrase is used by someone who’s looking for a specific thing or a specific website. The transactional keyword phrases are used by those who are ready to spend money on something, and the commercial research phrases are used by those who are still in the comparison stage, shopping for the right things.

So an example of an informational keyword phrase might be something like how to lose weight quickly. The person is looking for a way to do that, and you can develop content that explains it to them.

A navigational keyword phrase might be someone typing in a specific website such as MyFitnessPal home page. They want to go exactly to a specific page or a domain in general.

For transactional keyword phrases, you often have a word included that specifically says they want to spend money, such as where to buy weight loss supplements online. The commercial research phrases might be something like best weight loss programs of 2023.

If you go to Google and type in a phrase, they will continue presenting you with specific keyword phrases below that all have different user intent, to help guide you in the right direction.

In addition to finding these user intent keywords with a keyword tool, you can also look online where your target audience is engaged and active and mine that content for terminology that your demographic is using.

The Power of Semantic Keywords Online

Now that you know a little more about user intent, as opposed to simply looking at a keyword and gauging the volume and competitiveness of it, you want to advance your keyword capabilities even more by understanding how semantic keywords can work in your favor.

A long time ago, marketers targeted keywords that were an exact match to the one they wanted to rank for. However, Google and other search engines have altered their algorithms to provide content to their users based on related keywords that may provide an effective result.

Thanks to new technology, search engines can now differentiate between the exact words and the meaning behind them. They can connect the relationship between certain phrases and understand it more than simply looking for the order of letters and matching it to a keyword phrase that might be on your site.

So it’s semantic keyword is something orbiting in the realm of the main keyword phrase. For example, if you have a main keyword like weight loss, you can also have other broad keywords like calories, fitness, and BMI.

But you will also have semantic keywords that are long tail phrases, and these are often great ways to grasp user intent. For example, a keyword phrase like best weight loss program is a semantic keyword that you can use in your content to create a comparison of different programs and ultimately convert your visitor into a buyer.

A semantic keyword phrase is not a synonym. It’s something that complements the original word or phrase. For example, if calorie deficit is your primary keyword phrase, then a semantic list might include metabolic rate, burning calories, sustainable weight loss, and more.

Instead of using one main keyword over and over again, which reads in an unnatural way, you’ll have a wide array of phrases that pull in closely related ideas to give your reader a better overview of the topic.

Google provides these phrases to you at the bottom of a search engine results page (SERP). For the phrase calorie deficit, it gives things like how to calculate a calorie deficit, how long to lose weight on a calorie deficit, and more.

Tapping Into Keywords You Haven’t Yet Targeted

As you begin uncovering all of these keywords, such as the ones for user intent and semantic clusters, you will want to keep going and find other ways to discover how your audience might be searching for your niche information.

A competitor analysis, done manually or with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools can on earth many different keyword phrases that you may have been ignoring to date. Keep in mind that they can also snoop on the keywords being used on your site, so you have to make sure you don’t lose your ranking.

This is like having someone else conduct research for you, and if you discover they are using keyword phrases that are easy to rank for because of low competition, it will be a task you want to add to your content efforts.

The key to making the most of keywords you discover through competitors’ content is to employ the use of a skyscraper method where you dissect their content to see what made it rank well, and then do better than what they have done initially.

Advanced Use of Your Newly Uncovered Keywords

When you accumulate more keywords than you know what to do with, you want to start applying them in your online content in a variety of ways. First, you can see how they can be used with on page SEO techniques.

Not only will this include your anchor text and file names, but it can also include things like schema markup for rich snippets that can give your content a boost in the search engine results pages.

You can also take the long tail keywords with specific buyer intent in your niche and cater to the needs of voice search users. Google and other search engines are beginning to prioritize these based on the growing number of people using tools like Siri and Alexa to speak their searches.

You never know what algorithm changes are on the horizon, so making use of the keywords you discover must be a flexible task for you – one that’s done frequently and is adaptable to shifts in strategy by the users.