Strategies and Data
The essence of strategy is making plans about actions you will take in anticipation of what your competitors, colleagues, or customers will do. Much of strategy planning can feel like you’re tapping into a sort of premonition, guessing which way the market will turn based on new and existing conditions. Other strategies — arguably more successful ones — are based on data.
It is no secret that in any age of business, data and analytics are the most valuable commodity a company has. In the ancient world, Egyptians knew that every July the Nile river would swell and flood its banks and so they would plant their seeds in time to take advantage of all that extra moisture. This made Egypt the de facto breadbasket of the earliest civilizations and the most important country in history. Today, monitoring trends and gathering data are no less imperative.
As digital marketing experts, we put much of our resources into understanding the interests of our clients’ audiences and capitalizing on their search queries. Given the potential for significant capital gains, search engine optimization has quickly become the cornerstone of our business.
Keywords and Copy
As any Utah marketing firm will attest, keyword optimization is the central pillar of good SEO. It all starts with meticulous research into what your customers are searching for and distilling that into a few prime words that you can pepper throughout your marketing copy.
Luckily, the most popular search engines of the day all recognize how important keywords are and offer tools for you to use that show the saturation of certain words in queries on their platforms. For instance, a visit to a strategy tool like Moz will show you:
- Keyword volume in searches
- The difficulty in getting a certain keyword to rank
- The chances that a keyword will improve or worsen over time
- A list of recent and/or popular queries involving those keywords
With data such as this, it’s easier for an SEO expert like those on our team at Gravitate One to improve their digital marketing efforts and capitalize on the trending topics in a specific market.
A Word About Difficulty
Keyword difficulty, as stated above, indicates the likelihood that a keyword will rank well. Depending on how much competition it has, you may decide that your energy is better spent including a different keyword into your marketing copy.
Difficulty is determined by looking at the backlinking that is going on in the first 10 pages of a given search query involving that specific keyword. For example, if the keywords were “senior vacation,” a strategy tool would be able to tell you whether or not that’s an effective phrase based on how often pages with those words are referred to by other websites.
- From here, you can determine the Page Authority of a specific page (it’s stronger if more pages are linking back to it).
- You can also see the Domain Authority (how popular the entire website hosting that page is).
Domain Authority tells if a link is of good quality (a reference to a Disneyland-sponsored senior vacation event, for example, will mean more than a Facebook post about the best places grandma went this summer); Page Authority helps with understanding the specific ranking of keywords.
A Word About Opportunity
Keyword improvement, as referenced above, is known within the SEO portion of digital marketing as Opportunity. This measurement can be used as a KPI for your current keywords in helping you know how your pages are doing. High performance means high opportunity while plummeting performance portends the opposite effect.
When strategizing for current and future keywords, Opportunity is a helpful metric that lets us know if we need to try something new with the latest batch of blogs and ad copy. With an experienced team dedicated solely to keyword research, Gravitate One is one of Utah’s best-suited marketing firms for setting up a client for success in SEO.
Writing Effective Content
Once the keywords are chosen, it’s time to put them to use. This is where Gravitate’s content team comes into play. We utilize a number of effective keywords for each client, placing them on a kind of “good, better, and best” scale that ensures that the most effective keywords are placed more frequently throughout the copy.
It’s not just about placement, however. Search engines like Google appreciate that keywords are creatively used — well-placed in contextually appropriate portions throughout the page and not breaching the cardinal sin of “keyword stuffing.”
As one can see, it takes a village to properly utilize keywords in your digital marketing materials. SEO experts, cost-per-click experts, copywriting experts…Gravitate has them all, which makes us one of the most competitive marketing firms in Utah. If you have questions about how you can improve your marketing copy through keywords, give us a call.