When you've stuck with traditional keywords research: a new SEO keywords strategy for blog

Table of Contents

KEY TERMS

Keywords research

Keywords mapping

Audience affinity

Conversion Funnel Audit

TARGET AREAS

Blog

SEO Keywords expansion

Content research

Content refreshing

CONSULTING

Content strategy

Editorial calendar

SEO financial model

PROBLEM QUESTION:

Is Blogging for SEO still a powerful tactic?

The tactic usually includes the following sequence:

Creating the content for the sake of earning clicks from search engines.
Converting the clicks to leads.
Nurturing the leads through email, content marketing or social.
Converting the leads to Paid Customers (Consumers) for your Product.

This tactics requires:

PRODUCT-CLIENT FIT

A “Product - Client Fit”, i.e. readers of the informational content on the blogs are a good fit for your product

SEARCH DEMAND

A search demand for content: potential clients are searching for the information in Google, etc

LOW COMPETITION

Low competition is search: there’s not so much content in search for the given subject.

FINANCIAL MODEL

Sound financial model for this: calculating what you’ve invested vs what you’ve earned.

COST OF MAINTENANCE

Pricing in the cost of maintenance of the content (not only creating and promotions).

HIGH PAGERANK

High PageRank of your domain: preferably, an old trustworthy domain

Problem

After a while, when a competition in search becomes a problem, the whole tactic appears under question. Most of the marketers then turn to keywords discovery and analysis tools to find brand new “virgin” keywords with no/low competition and repeat the whole thing again.

When the existing search demand is exhausted or competition drives the cost of earning clicks too high, there comes a blogging dilemma. A pressure for results from management makes most marketers say: “It’s always better to do something than nothing”.

The blogging dilemma: push expand the site's keywords even through adding less relevant / more distant keywords or do nothing?

BOHDAN LYTVYN

Founder, Nertis

Business implications & a cost of problem

Yet, this “go-go” choice hides several important implications.

BLIND-GUESSING

Always a “blind guessing” since keywords found off analysis tools like Semtush lack any relation to the actual user experience, i.e. keywords given without context.

THE FOLLOWERS PATH

Perpetuates a “follower’s pattern”: new keywords are most likely sourced from competitors but you don’t know their (full) strategy to effectively copy.

TRAFFIC COST OF HANDLING

Not all traffic is born equal. Some put an extensive pressure on Lead scoring (overall lead gen) team, Customer support and Sales.

Keyword mining and matching...

This looks like keyword “mining” in the sense that it resembles matching of keywords to product offering insomuch as it’s based on the inherent lack of context (beyond mere guesses). Keyword mining comes a price too.

that drains the resources

Drains resources (time and money) to produce a content off this keywords
Leaves a content team in the constant frustration and with a little sense of direction
Results in erratic moves and a sense of lack of purpose or a single direction
Leads to additional pressure on customer support / sales as well as complicates lead scoring.

Anatomy of false targets

Let’s see the kind of traffic these false targets in keyword research bring.

Windfall traffic

'False target' clicks are relatively easy to gain (provided that you have some trust from Google), but hard to keep. Intuitively, companies that use the same keyword research tools are here to follow your steps and copy your moves.

First in, first out

The company that is the first to use the keyword is not necessarily the first to monetize the traffic. Whereas keywords targeting may secure some clicks, the audience intent is far from obvious. Answering a question of how to convert clicks into meaningful actions as per new keywords takes time and experimenting. The competitor who is the first to find the right converting path for a group of new keywords is likely to take away the top positions as well.

Easy to gain, hard to retain

Resources necessary to keep the clicks coming in are going to be higher than to win it in the first place. This includes the competitor pressure (including backlinks “arms race”), money losses from suboptimal conversion as well as the percentage of dead false targets, i.e. keywords you should try in the first place.

Business considerations that oppose false targets setting

Content research: find what’s currently performing best? Why? Does this provide any clues?

SEO temperature Research: what is the minimal core set of metrics that allows describe a performance of blog vs site-wide SEO & keywords metrics

Business dimension (goals): what’s the conversion effect vis a vis other channels, is the target conversion feasible business-wise

Cost of refreshing the content: how soon the content made is meant to be refreshed?

Venues research: where to post, e.g. Blog vs Medium / Substack, etc 3rd party sites?

Solution

1. Combination of keywords research and audience analysis (and social listening)

2. Prioritisation of keywords based on audience affinity and “predicates” analysis.

For whom is this solution?

Marketers that already have active blogs, but the immediate search demand has already been covered. There’s no more low hanging fruits achievable through keywords analysis in B2B SaaS, Founder Companies, e-Commerce blogs and Free Resources, Affiliate publisher websites.

Editorial teams looking to revamp or revitalise old or decaying blogs and are looking for a fresh start with more keywords.

Marketers working in “narrow” niches where there’s not enough search demand and who are looking to squeeze more of the existing demand (without losing product-client fit quality).

Businesses who want to make larger investments in SEO but don’t know the market sizing and the scope of potential demand.