5 Steps For Grouping Your Keywords - Content Marketing Strategy

In my last blog I talked about the major change in the way Google and other search engines are ranking keywords -- keyword groups vs. individual keywords -- and the major impact it is having on SEO and content marketing efforts.

After receiving several email requests to share the best practices on how to group keywords, I decided to write a blog on that subject.  It also gave me a chance to play around with a new infographics maker tool called Piktochart. 


Summary of Steps from the Infographics:

Step 1: Talk To Your Customers
Talk to your customers.  Ask how do they refer to your product / service. Ask them how did they find you.  What are the keywords they used in the search engine query -- if that's how they found you.

Step 2: Talk To Your Support and Sales
Ask your support how your customers are referring to your solution when they are having a problem.  Ask your sales people the same question about how your prospects refer to your product.

Step 3: Conduct Competitive Research
Find out what are the keyword variations that your competitors are ranking for.  Run SEO tools on their site to find out what are their target keywords.  Then compare these with the keywords they rank for. The keywords that are not targeted but still ranked belong to one of the keyword groups.

Step 4: Use Google's Suggestions
Type your main keywords in the search engine and see what are Google's suggestions.  These may belong in the same group. Look into Google Adwords for related and suggested keywords.  Also look for specific queries in Adwords.

Step 5: Organize in Groups
Map out all the relevant keywords and organize them in logical groups -- based on the steps above and your subject matter knowledge.

Keep Testing!
This process will give you a starting point with the keyword groups.  Keep testing and updating your keyword group map -- since the groupings change and your competitors activities impact SERP rankings.

Some of the SEO tools that could be useful are Moz, SEMRush, Screaming Frog, Majestic SEO, and Positionly.

A Major Shift in SEO and Content Marketing: Keywords vs. Concepts

One of the key trends discussed at SMX West 2015 is something we have been increasingly noticing from search engines -- focus on concepts vs. keywords.

This paradigm change has been causing shifts in SERP rankings for the last several months and we have been adjusting our SEO and content marketing strategy to align with it.

Concepts vs. keywords change is pretty fundamental and will most likely be continuously impacting your search engine rankings.  This article examines more details behind this change, discusses how it can affect your rankings, and provides five strategies for taking advantage of this trend.

Keywords vs. concepts/themes.  For years we have been focused on specific keywords.  We have been identifying target keywords,  monitoring their performances, and creating campaigns to improve our rankings.

Hard to Manage.  You can easily see how this SEO approach can get overwhelming and unmanageable.  Each product can have hundreds of keywords to target.  If you have multiple products, you may need to be tracking and promoting thousands of keywords.

How do you accomplish that? Do you create thousands of content pieces a month to rank better?  That sounds like a daunting task.  However, many companies have been doing exactly that -- either manually or by using tools to automate the process of creating individual content pages for each keyword.

Poor content quality.  It's obvious that it's impossible to create unique and engaging content for thousands of related words every week without astronomic budgets and resources.  As a result, the content produced through this strategy has been highly repetitive and lacked value.

Search quality issues.  These tactics allowed companies manipulate search engines for a while, resulting in low quality search results.  However, Google has been catching up with such tactics and penalizing low quality and duplicate content with Penguin and Panda updates.

And now a more fundamental change is happening.

Semantic search.  With the semantic search becoming more prevalent, Google is increasingly ranking groups of related keywords vs. individual ones.  The grouping criteria is based on the word order, paid/organic search history, contextual meaning, word relationships, content relevance, domain authority, and other factors.

Good news!  This means that your SEO work for specific keywords may result in uplifting your rankings for related keywords as well, even the ones you have not been specifically targeting.

Less on-page SEO.  It also means less emphasis on the on-page SEO -- less counting how many times specific keywords should show up on your web pages.  The practice of creating a page for each specific (related) keyword becomes mostly irrelevant.

Unexpected results.  On a flip side, you may discover wild swings in your target keywords rankings because these specific searches are not as compartmentalized as before.
They are viewed in a wider content of keyword groups. 

As a result, your efforts on individual keywords may not be as effective as before.  This could be especially the case if you have a better established competitor that dominates related keywords in SERPs.



Here are five recommendations on embracing this change and making the best out of it:

• Do research and understand top keywords you want to focus on
• Do monitor your individual keywords so you know how they perform and which competitors to focus on
• Do try to understand how individual keywords are grouped in concepts / themes
• Do create good quality and unique content around the themes/groupings you want focus on
• Do use social channels to promote your content and generate high quality links

Also check out my blog on 5 steps to organize your keywords in groups for best SEO & content marketing results. 

9 Essential Principles For Successful PPC Strategies - B2B Marketing

Skydiving looks very simple when somebody else does it.  Beautiful skies.  Amazing views.  Adrenaline rushing!  So cool!

...Until you get up there.  Then things change.  All of the sudden the skies don't look as friendly.  The landscape below can be deadly.  Every detail matters a lot.  

The reality is that it never gets easy, especially when there may be an ambush waiting for you when you land. 


PPC looks simple as well, at least from the surface.  Load up the keywords, come up with an ad copy and a landing page, define your bids, and leads should be pouring in!

The reality is very different though.  Results are often disappointing. Time is wasted. Budgets are spent.  Bids are placed.   Yet there is no meaningful amount of leads. 

What's wrong with this picture?

Complexity.  Google Adwords have become an incredibly difficult platform loaded with an incredible amount of features.  Anything from defining the types of matches for your keywords to figuring out the right grouping for the best results and quality scores to what kind of words to use in the ad copy to what day and time to advertise, which geographies, and many other factors.

Competition.  A crowded market is like a battlefield.  It is likely that your competitors have dedicated at least as many resources and funds for Adwords as you have. Plus they may have a decent agency.

This makes a huge difference because a really good agency has best practices, specialized resources, and a privileged access to Google.  It would be almost impossible to win the game without similar resources.

Funds.  CPC increases every month in many competitive industries.  With more players and more money spent by each vendor, the cost of conversion goes up.  Even more importantly, the entry barrier goes up significantly.  This means that even with $10K per month you may not get meaningful results.  You may need a significantly larger budget and a rock star agency plus a great in-house resource to succeed.  

Lead Costs .  Even then, the cost of each lead may prove to not be worth the investment. 


This is a dark, yet a realistic picture I painted to instill reality into inexperienced marketers itching to try this solo and to help marketing professionals ground overly eager executives itching to see their company name and specific messages on the page 1 of Google search engine quickly. 


Bringing a parallel to military, it is the same as sending amateurs to fight a Special Forces unit and expecting amazing results.







 





9 Best PPC Practices


Yet, PPC programs do work.  Below are 9 recommendations on building a successful PPC program in B2B space.

1.  Define Your Goals. What are your goals?  Are you you looking to generate leads, increase brand awareness, or both?  It's critical to have a clear set of goals start.  Set realistic expectations for the initial success and growth afterwards.  

2.  Define Your Target Lead Types.  This is one of the most critical steps.  Define what kind of leads are you expecting to generate.  If you skip this step and start getting lower quality leads, your conversion economics may not work and you may end up spending a fortune on acquiring traffic that doesn't convert.   Check out recent research on this topic from Industry View (see the chart below).

 


3.  Reality / Economics.  Find out what are the CPCs for your target keywords.  Multiply by the conversation rates to calculate the expected cost of acquisition.  Add 10-15% for agency fees.  Is this number feasible for you?  If not, PPC may not be the right channel for you.  If it is, define the max amount you are willing to spend on each lead.  Calculate the delta you are willing to pay for the brand awareness.

4.  Find a good agency.
This is a tough one.  There are lots of OK agencies and terrible ones.  Things to look for is experience in your space, ability to assign an experienced resource, desire to spend enough time with your account, willingness to start with a smaller investment, an ability to show early results, and willingness to work with you if the initial results are not there.  Expect and be ready to go through several bad agencies till you find a good one.  
5.  Internal Resource.  You should expect to have an internal resource focused and later maybe even dedicated  to this program, because an external agency is never going to be as knowledgeable in your space as somebody from your organization. To be effective, this has to be a joint internal/agency effort.

6.  Start small.  
Start as small as it is feasible.  In some industries that may not be possible. Work with your agency to see what's the minimal investment that can yield meaningful results.  Then add a delta for experimenting.  In some cases this can be as high as 60%. 

7.  Time and resource expectations.
Budget time for experimenting with keywords, ad copies, landing pages, etc -- until you start seeing a steady flow of leads.  It may take anywhere from a week to a few months.  It is a common mistake to expect an immediate impact.  There are at least 20-30 parameters that can impact the results.  It will take time to identify these, fix them (sometimes multiple times), A/B test, and start seeing the impact.

8.  Expand. Expand into new keywords, geographies, PPC programs, etc. This will help you find the most optimal channels and bring down conversion costs. 

9.  Ramp up organic programs.
At the end of the day, you can't win a battle with just a single type of a weapon.

PPC is just one way to generate leads.  It is expensive.  It's complicated. As a result, very often it is not a scaleable way to generate leads.  

While you can sometimes make PPC economics work for you, you can get significantly better results when you apply the knowledge and expertise gained from PPC to your organic efforts, like SEO, content marketing, and social marketing. 

In our case, only 25% of our highest quality leads comes from PPC.  The rest come from organic efforts, like content marketing, social / community marketing, SEO, etc. 

Best of luck in your lead generation efforts!

100% Inbound Lead Generation - Possible?

Is it possible to completely eliminate cold calling and other outbound activities that cost a ton and don't convert easily?

Yes, it is.  In 3 years, we have shut down all outbound activities, like cold calling and trade shows.

Meanwhile, we have scaled inbound activities, like content marketing, SEO, social and community marketing.

That strategy has paid off a lot.

 Here are some results:

• 20x increase in the highest quality leads
• 9x increase in cost of leads
• 8x increase in conversion rates

This approach liberates sales people from the lead generation activities, providing them extra time to focus on converting these leads.

Here is the latest breakdown of high quality leads:

• 65% - organic leads (content marketing, SEO, social, community, digital PR)
• 25% - PPC
• 10% - email nurturing
• 
  

No trade shows last year.  No cold calls.  No paid content syndication.  No airport or freeway banners.