In today’s online marketing environment, the marketing content found on any company’s website has become the single most important factor is determining how successful a company’s marketing campaign is going to be. It holds the key to helping potential customers/clients find the business through a forest of competitors all competing for the same dollars.

Wouldn’t it be great if a content manager could get into the mind of search engine users to see how they think? What a great opportunity it would present to be able to develop content that hits home with prospective clients every time. Well, that ability already exists in the form of keyword research.

What is Keyword Research?
Because people tend to be creatures of habit, the way they think lends itself to predictability, which becomes the basis for keyword research. Keyword research is a process which enables content managers to actually get into the mind of potential customers/clients for the purpose of understanding how they are going to type keyword search terms into search engines when looking for goods or services. By identifying these key terms, a company can develop and use SEO content to find its way to the top pages of search engine results, which is going to result in higher website traffic levels. According to Google research, 18% of the clicks for any given search go to the first site listed. Further more, 26% of the clicks come from the first page. Numbers like these show the relevance of ad placement.

The Process of Keyword Research
Content managers and website developers tend to design websites that address their own expectations and answer the questions they want answered. Unfortunately, this often proves to be ineffective because customers don’t think like employees, they think like customers. It’s a far better option to find out what outsiders (customers) are looking for and fill SEO with that information. This can be achieved in several ways.

Hold discussion groups with customers to get a sense of how they use search.

Get recommendations from front-line employees (salespeople and customer representatives) to see what lingo they find popular with customers.

Read customer blogs and product reviews to see how they write about products and services. The way they write is a great representation of how they think.

Review the websites of popular and successful competitors for potentially important keywords.

By using the methods, content managers can learn to think like a customer and design SEO that targets popular and often ignored keyword phrases.

New Ways to Develop Keyword Content
Thanks in large part to innovations such as predictive search, customers/clients are no longer required to use an exact string of keywords in order to find what they are seeking. They can now type in general phrases that more closely emulate normal thinking and talking. These new innovations have also allowed content managers to stop focusing on exact keyword matches in favor of content that tends to answer relevant questions that customers want answered.

The Benefits of Keyword Research
Before content managers are willing to change the way they have developed SEO, they are going to want some assurance that the potential benefits warrant change. The whole point of keyword research is that by its very nature, content managers are going to realize benefits because they are going to be able to match content to customer expectations. The potential benefits they can expect to receive include

• Identify popular missing keywords
• Receive results that are indeterminable through normal analytical review
• Capture more site traffic
• Eliminate the need to guess what content is going to be most effective

The time has come for website developers and content managers to put ego aside and stop guessing about what content is going to be most effective. With keyword research, the tools are available to help those responsible for content to look like geniuses when site traffic and sales jump off the charts. Anything worth doing is worth doing right and keyword research makes that possible.