Keyword Dos and Don'ts: Improve Your Keyword Strategy

A smart keyword strategy is a foundation for nearly all digital marketing efforts. It’s particularly important for your organic content because it can help shape your content strategy, and give your content a better chance of ranking high in search results. Although keyword use has been a major part of digital marketing since the beginning, there are still some misconceptions about how and when to integrate them into your work.

We put together this short guide to keyword dos and don’ts to help marketers in the B2B space (and others) use them effectively.

Identify the Right Keywords for Your Content

Anyone who has used a search engine has used keywords. When you get results that are relevant to your search, it’s because the content that has been deemed useful by the search engine’s algorithm in part because it contains some or all of the same words you used while searching.

Smart content marketers infuse keywords into their website headlines, copy, metadata, and elsewhere to increase the odds of their content showing up at the top of search results.

Identifying the right keywords to use for your content can be a relatively simple process. Start with conducting keyword research by looking into search trends and queries for your industry. CID’s digital marketing and strategy team members use tools like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and others to do a deep dive into terms that are relevant to our clients’ content. These tools let us see how often a term is searched (its volume) and related terms.

These words and phrases (also known as “long tail keywords”) tend to be somewhat general, and that’s by design. A person searching for a manufacturing partner to make a metal widget, for example, is probably going to search for “metal widget manufacturer” and not “Acme Widget Company’s AW-4532B Widget.” The goal is to strike a balance between the too general (like “widget) and the too specific (the product number).

It can be tempting to use your specific product names as keywords, but our advice is to do so only under unique circumstances such as a product launch, and even then it shouldn’t be the only keyword you’re counting on. Plus, if you’re a distributor of a brand-name product, using that brand name as your main or only keyword means you’re fighting an uphill battle. You’ll never rank higher in search than the official brand itself.

	Conduct keyword research using a tool like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, or Moz to learn what questions people are asking about products or services like yours.
	Rely on your product names, part numbers, or other terms that are extremely specific to your organization as your sole keywords.
	People are more likely to search for general terms or phrases, especially if they’re at the beginning of their buyer’s journey. Keeping keywords general but relevant will increase the odds that your content will be found.

Keywords Inform Content Strategies

Conducting keyword research is a vital step in your content marketing efforts. Look at the long tail keywords that come up in your research and (sticking with our imaginary widget company) you’ll likely see phrases like “Why do I need a widget” or “How to choose a widget manufacturer?”

It’s a wealth of topics and categories you can use to shape your strategy and the content itself. Using this tactic helps you create content that’s relevant to your audience. Publishing content like articles or website pages that answer questions people are asking can help boost your search ranking as well as build trust with your audience.

Marketers that engage in “keyword stuffing” — that is, getting as many keywords in a blog post as possible without worrying about quality or context — are setting themselves up to fail. Maybe their content will rank higher for a little while. But, as soon as site visitors see that they aren’t getting the information they thought they were they’ll leave almost immediately, negatively impacting your site’s bounce rate and potentially your brand’s reputation with prospects and search engines as well.

	Use keyword research to shape your content strategy and create content that answers your audience’s questions. This helps your brand stand out as a knowledgeable thought leader.
	Avoid “keyword stuffing” your content. You might rank higher in search but fail to deliver real or helpful content to your audience, and tarnish your brand’s reputation.
	Providing helpful, relevant content is another metric search engines use to decide if your content is good enough to get served up first on the search engine results page. Plus, it’s just the right thing to do.

Use Keywords Wisely to Optimize Your Content

The flipside of keyword stuffing is not using keywords in your content at all or not using them as effectively as you could. Jade Scaffidi, one of our resident SEO experts, says “Using keywords in the first 100 words of copy on your website pages is vital for SEO optimization.”

Other important places to use keywords include:

• Page Titles, Headlines, or H1s
• Meta Titles
• Meta Descriptions
• Subheads or H2s
• The body copy of your content
• Image alt tags

Using keywords in these places will help the search engine’s spiders that crawl your site “understand” what your content is about, and index it so it can be found more easily. There are a couple of important caveats, however.

When it comes to image tags, be careful to only use keywords that are relevant to the image. The purpose of image tags is to describe the image so that people using screen readers can understand what the image is. Sites that use their images as an opportunity to keyword stuff will actually get dinged by search engines for not meeting accessibility requirements.

Trying to be sneaky about including keywords in your content usually doesn’t get the results you’re hoping for. Whether you’re trying to wedge a few more words in by hiding them using the same color text as your site’s background or using lengthy descriptions deep down on the page, the fact is that you’re really just telling the search engine that you’re not providing relevant content and you don’t deserve to be ranked high. (What can we say, the SEO gods are ruthless.)

The best thing you can do is write your content with your human audience in mind first, not the algorithm. Besides, Google itself wants you to write for people and be the expert you are. It’s part of their E-E-A-T recommendations, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Doing that well and naturally infusing keywords into your copy will do more for your content and your brand than trying to fake your way there anyway.

	Use keywords in important places on your site like headlines, meta descriptions, and the first 100 words of your copy, but always write for people, not bots.
	Don’t try to trick the robots by misusing image alt tags or sneaking keywords into your copy with no context.
	An important factor in whether a site is considered quality or not is if it actually is providing useful information to readers. So, if you’re trying to game the system, in the end you’re just going to play yourself.

Your organic content deserves to be seen by your audience. Make sure they see it by using a keyword strategy that helps them find your content and delivers the information they’re searching for.

CID has a team that lives and breathes keywords Get in touch with us to tap into their expertise and optimize your content.