Study Notes
Download pdf 785 KB
12 years delivering excellence
Join a global community
Globally recognised
Toolkits, content & more
Keyword research helps you identify what your target audience is looking for. Conducting keyword research for content planning involves:
Searchmetrics is a good tool to use for keyword research. If you enter the keyword ‘women’s socks’ in this tool, Searchmetrics shows you the searched term first, then offers other related terms that you could consider creating content around, such as ‘best women’s socks’, ‘cute women’s socks’, and ‘warm women’s socks’. Many branded terms are also included, but as a whole, unless you’re doing a piece of content strictly about brand comparisons, you should avoid targeting competitor branded terms. Even if your website is listed for a brand competitor search, the content will likely have a high exit and bounce rate, since the customer is specifically looking for ‘brand X socks.’ This means, unless you have an article showing how your product is superior to brand X, then the user likely isn’t going to be interested.
Over-optimization is overusing keywords or phrases you want to rank for.
Over-optimization can cause your site not to be shown in SERPs because the search engines may think that you are trying to manipulate their crawlers to get better SERP rankings.
For an example of over-optimized text, see slide ‘Over-optimization of keywords’.
The e-commerce clothing site in this example wants to optimize for ‘vintage clothing’ and keyword variations containing the terms ‘retro’ and ‘fashion’. However, these words are mentioned too many times in the text to sound natural.
(If you are unsure whether or not something is over-optimized, simply look at it, and read it out loud to yourself or to someone else. That way, you’ll find out how easy it is to read.)
Additionally, such content isn’t helpful to the user. It offers no real value or substance. Search engines are getting better daily at determining whether or not content was created to be useful for the user or just to appease search engines.
Once we have a list of keywords that we want to create content around, we can translate those into topics for our SEO content. To do this:
When translating keywords to topics, ask yourself: ‘What would people searching for this term be most interested in?’ Then create content that ties in with the keyword.
The keyphrase ‘Paisley Men’s Socks’, translates to the topics ‘The History of Paisley in Men’s Fashion’ and ‘Who Invented Paisley?’
Both topics contain some of the keyphrase, but don’t match it exactly to avoid over-optimization. Search engines are smart enough now to know that this content is related to the keyword.
Back to TopDigital Marketing Consultant and Writer
Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:
The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful.
You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library
You will not be assessed on this content in your final exam.
ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module covers the key concepts involved in SEO and content marketing. It outlines best practices for researching your SEO content and aligning it with your content strategy. It also covers best practices for creating content in a productive and efficient way, and demonstrates how to evaluate the performance of your content to ensure that it is meeting your content strategy objectives.