You have sunk a lot of hours into seeking to understand (and forecast) how your audience searches for information online and how they use that to make buying decisions.
After you have finished researching keywords, what do you do with all of your hard work?
The next step is to optimize your main navigation pages and build content (utilize inbound marketing) to support the queries that you chose.
Find Your Competitors
Google (insert your search engine here) that query from your target location and look at the first page results, or any page ranking above yours, this is what Google finds to be a quality result. These are your competitors.
Analyze SERP – Competing Pages
Each search engine optimization strategist has their own method for analyzing web pages. In general you will be looking at things like: meta, H tags, word count, schema, images/media and backlinks.
OnPage Optimization
The tasks here will vary depending on the SERP analysis you complete in Step 2, however, in a general sense you will want to complete the following:
- Include Exact Match Keyword in the Title tag
- Include Exact Match Keyword in the H1 tag
- Create H2, H3, H4 Tags with Related (LSI) Keywords
- Create content in the format of the featured snippet you’re trying to win
- Have a competitive word count
- Utilize images
- Build strong links
Inbound Marketing
Use your keyword research as a foundation for your entire content strategy. During your serp analysis you should have uncovered a pattern in content topics that support the search query.
Write articles for each of those supportive keywords and link back to the main navigation page.
Beware of making spammy content. Keywords are a great way to increase traffic and boost conversions but don’t overuse keywords in your content. If you overuse keywords, you not only risk making your content sound unnatural to your readers but you could get penalized by the search engines.