Keywords are the competitive tool in the search marketing toolbox

In fact, it could be argued that the approach you take when undertaking keywords research can make or break you search marketing campaign so it’s critical to get it right.

Identifying the right keywords should kick off every search marketing process, but it doesn’t stop there. Coming up with a list of keywords is one thing but ‘choosing your battles’ when it comes to identifying your priority keywords is another.

Here, it is essential to acknowledge that search marketing is a competitive game. For any business owner or sales or marketing professional who browses the internet, it can be extremely frustrating to see a competitor of yours performing better than you do on Google – even though you might have a superior service or sell better quality products at a more competitive price.

Getting to the top of the search engines whether using PPC or SEO methods means tackling the competition head on. This is why, after collating a list of keywords together, it’s important to use some of the available analytics tools to carry out sufficient competitive analysis.

At this point, it’s important to determine which keywords have high enough search volume to make them potentially lucrative, but also have low enough competition to make them viable.

Get your keyword research right and you will have the beginnings of a lucrative lead generation machine that has the potential to deliver you a regular supply of SQLs. Get it wrong, and things could get costly quite soon and yield little or no return on investment.

Once you have your hotlist of keywords, things can start getting interesting. It’s at this point that you can start to build a framework for your machine. A framework that is otherwise known as a ‘funnel’.

We cover more about marketing funnels in our blog ‘Creating a lead generation funnel’