Keyword Research Still Overlooked by Small Business Owners in Scotland
Lots of small business owners across Scotland are still not doing enough Keyword Research.
I have come across a huge amount of evidence from Edinburgh up through Fife and across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland of no keyword research being done. This is especially ubiquitous in the micro and small business communities where large swathe have not used a Keyword Research Tool. I find this absolutely astonishing.
The reason being when speaking with these micro small business owners, you ask what their biggest challenge is with their website, and they answer – I am not getting any traffic.
And when looking at the content on their pages sure enough, you find that the pages are not using any keywords that their audience is actually searching with and yet that small business could be offering the solution. The problem – keyword research, followed by no on-the-page optimisation to tune pages towards Searchers Intent.
I thought therefore that I would air here again a Video Blog by Rand Fishkin back in 2016 on the topic titled;
A Step By Step Process for Discovering Keywords – Your Best Keywords
Selecting Keywords that Match Searchers Intent
Collecting Keyword Metrics and Sort Filter Prioritise them based on Goals
What you want to do is take all the keywords in each of the lists and get the metrics for them so you can prioritize them properly. Your list of keywords will have metrics for:
- Volume – how often each month are they searched for
- Keyword difficulty
- How hard will this keyword rank in the organic results
- Does the keyword have click-through rate opportunity
Rand’s video blog provides more in-depth steps to the above process before you reach your fourth step which is;
Determine Keyword Targeting for New Content Creation – Prioritise Your List
By the time you reach this final step you will understand this is a phenomenal way to go through keyword research and keyword targeting. This will help you get the content and the optimization priorities that you need, if you are going to have any degree of success from your SEO efforts. You will have to choose the right data and the right tools, and use multiple sources. You will have to intelligently build the right kinds of keyword lists. Then, use that metrics data to prioritize your page content etc. The morale of the story is you cannot just throw content onto a page with just pure intuition. Spend the time doing some serious keyword research and based on what you have read here and saw in Rand’s video blog, you can have phenomenal success.
Of course if you don’t have any time to do this on your own because you are busily doing what you set out to do as a business owner, then consider hiring a professional digital marketing practitioner who has access to all the tools required for this task. And then you could also get help in crafting some quality content if you suffer from writers block!!