Every website owner wants people to frequent their website. But not all of them succeed in attracting visitors in hordes.

Why?’

The reasons could be many. But one of the prominent reasons why people fail to visit your website is irrelevant or out-of-context keywords. If you want people to visit your website, you need to know what they search – the keywords or words they use and the content that best matches their intent.

Hence, if you want to get on top of the Google game, you need to do two things right – keyword research and understanding user intent.

Changes in the digital world happen thick and fast. For example, Google keeps updating its algorithms frequently, but one thing that has remained more or less consistent over the years is keyword research.

However, though the keyword research hasn’t changed much, the way it is done has seen quite a twist and turns.

Let us, therefore, take you through what is keyword research, how to develop your keyword strategy, and creating content with the user in mind so that you can optimise your online presence.

What is keyword research?

If you want to do well on search engines like Google, you need to know what search queries are used the most by your audience. It is in this context that keyword research assumes so much significance.

So, what is keyword research?

It is a process that helps you to know and understand the actual search terms people use to find what they are looking for on search engines. When you get a clear understanding of the actual search terms, the insight helps you to create a robust content strategy and a smart digital marketing strategy.

As a business owner who has an online presence, you must be aware of the importance of SEO. But that doesn’t mean that keywords or keyword research have lost their relevance.

When you do keyword research properly, you get to know what topics your audience is looking for, what do they like to read about, and the most popular topics among your audience. With proper keyword research, you also get to know your SEO keywords. SEO keywords are the terms/ phrases and keywords in your web content that allow visitors to find your site via search engines. When you optimise your site for search engines and speak the same language as that of your potential visitor, your chances of connecting to your target audiences increases substantially. And, that is what keyword research helps you do with ease.

Hence, with proper keyword research, you can get to know the keywords that are generating high volumes of searches every month and create a robust content strategy to target tour audiences.

How to develop your keyword strategy?

But if you want to do your keyword research properly, it is extremely important that you first have a keyword strategy in place. Doing keyword research is vital, but how you take your journey forward from there is equally important, and this is what makes your keyword strategy.

Based on your keyword research findings, a keyword research strategy is what guides you to make informed decisions about the content you need to create and how you need to monitor and track the results in analytics. A keyword strategy tells you how you need to target your keywords.

So, how should you develop your keyword strategy?

If you want to develop a robust keyword strategy, you need to focus on all the insights. A smart keyword strategy starts with self-assessment. Learn everything that you can about your product/ service and your competitors.

Understand your business

As mentioned earlier, you should first start to assess yourself, your business, your objectives, and your goals. Find out your USPs. Ask yourself, why would people want to visit my site? What is it that you want to convey to your audience? To learn all of this, you need to get hold of all the insights that you can so that you can utilise your resources properly.

Understand search intent

Search intent is an extremely important aspect if you want to do well in the digital world. If you want to know about the intent, it is important to know your audience first. You need to understand what people want, what they are looking for, and where they want to proceed. Try and learn whether your audience is only looking for information, or are they interested in buying things from you. When you know about the intent, you can create content to target the specific intent of your visitors.

Understand words

Words are the be-all and end-all of search. When you do keyword research, you come to know of the words people use to find what they are looking for on search engines. It helps you create user-oriented content that matches their intent to meet their requirements.

Understand your competition

When we talk of keyword strategy, competition forms an integral part of it. You need to have complete knowledge of what your competitors are doing. You need to know where your competitors are ranking for the search terms you are planning to target. When you study your competitors carefully, you can find out ways to outmanoeuvre them. You will get to know the keywords that will work for you – long tail or short keywords.

Understanding search engines

You will, of course, do all your competitor analysis on search engines. When you analyse your competitors, you don’t just get great insights into your competitor’s strategy, but you also get a fair bit of idea of what will happen when you type your main keywords or phrase. When you work so much on search engines, you get to know more about them, how they work, and how search engines give answers that result in no-click searches. Working on search engines over time can help you get a sense of a lot of things like featured snippets, local packs, and rich results.

Understanding data

If you want to make your keyword strategy successful, you need to analyse data. The more you analyse data, the better will be your keyword strategy. To analyse data, both before and after keyword research, you can take the help of Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives you great insights that can help you formulate a successful keyword strategy. Also, you can take the help of Google Search Console to get meaningful insights and pursue opportunities.

Creating content with the user in mind

People search the web with a clear intent in mind – most want answers to their problems, are looking for information about the products and services they want, or things they plan to buy. If you want web users to discover you, you need to optimise your content to match the user intent of your visitors.

Since Google takes pride in displaying the most relevant information to its users, you have to optimise your content for user intent so that it has a better chance of ranking well on the SERP. If you create content keeping user intent in mind, it helps your overall SEO efforts.

That is why it is essential to create content with the user in mind.

So, how do you create a user-intent SEO strategy for the content you produce?

The first thing you need to do is understand the different types of user intent. There are three stages of user intent. Turn to Google for help, and enter the search terms you think your audience will look for the most. The result you get will help you identify the type of content you need to create to tackle your audiences at different stages of user intent.

Informational search queries – The user in such search queries are just looking for more information about the product, topic, or service, and they are not ready to buy the stuff. For example, the query “how can a CRM help my business” is an informational search query. The result Google throws up for such queries are informational like how-to results (blogs and tutorials) with no ads on the result page.

Navigational search queries – The user in such queriesare looking for a specific type of content to firm up his or her option, but they are still some distance away from buying the product or service. For example, the query “what is the best way to choose a CRM” is a navigational search query. The result Google throws up for such queries will have blog posts with a comparative analysis that helps the user firm up his or her decision to buy. The result might give you a hint on how to buy the best CRM for your business, but no one is going all out to sell their product.

Transactional search queries – The user in such queries areall set to buy the product or service. For example, the query “where can I get good CRM for my business” is a transactional search query. Most of the results that Google throws up will be product pages from where you can buy a CRM.

Once you are aware of the different stages of user intent, it should become easy for you to create appropriate content with specific key phrases to target your audiences in each stage.

Next, make sure your existing content centres around user intent. You can do this by going to Google Analytics and checking your top-performing keywords. In case your top-performing keywords/ phrases are not matching the user intent, then you need to revisit your content strategy. What you need to do is create content for each different stage of user intent so that you can target your audience properly. You need to understand that when people are in the informational stage, they don’t plan to buy; hence you need to target them with informational content. But if your user is ready to buy, and your content is only informational, then you are missing out on opportunities. What you need is transactional content at this stage. Hence, it is important to produce content that caters to the user intent of your audiences in each stage.

That is why it is important to create content for user intent. Don’t just concentrate on keywords when you formulate a user-intent SEO strategy. What you need to do is create your content with user intent.  And, because Google understands intent well, it will become difficult for you to rank for content that does not match your keyword.

For instance, if you are targeting for a long-tail keyword like “how to make chicken curry”, but in your blog post, you write more about how to rear a chicken, then you will not rank for search results related to chicken curry; instead, your post will show up in chicken rearing. What this means is you need to create content with user intent in mind. If you don’t keep user intent in mind, you will not get the relevant traffic.

Also, if you want to target your audience through each stage of their journey, then you must create content that caters to each type of user intent. The best way is to guide your audience through each stage and take them to the buying stage finally so that you don’t lose on opportunities.

If you keep user intent in mind while creating content for your website, your SEO strategy is sure to take you places.

If you have any difficulty in keyword research or formulating an effective keyword strategy, you can get in touch with vStacks Software Solutionsnow. We are a full-service digital marketing company, and we can help you out in doing keyword research and in formulating an effective keyword strategy.

To do well in the business landscape, you need to build your brand and create a loyal customer base. You can do many things to build your brand and grow a loyal customer base. However, one of the best ways of doing both things is to leverage social media to your advantage.

Yes, social media helps businesses, both big and small, in brand building and nurturing a loyal customer base.
But unless you know how to leverage social media to your advantage, it is tough to get the desired results.

Undoubtedly, social media is growing at a phenomenal pace. Social media has not only connected family and friends, but it has also become the go-to place for people to know what others have to say about brands and services.

So, if you don’t use social media marketing to your advantage, you are missing big time on opportunities.

But using social media to connect with family and friends is different from using it to promote your business. If you (read businesses) want to reap the full benefits of the social media revolution, you need to make sure that you have a sound social media marketing strategy in place.

And, to formulate a sound social media marketing strategy, you can either do it yourself or hire an experienced social media marketing services company. But before getting started on social media, let us first try to understand what is a social media marketing strategy, how to grab your customer’s attention, and the platforms that are best for your brand.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

In social media marketing, you use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to communicate with your customers, prospects, and communities. You can do it through text, images, videos, or use any or all of them to communicate with your audience organically or through a paid campaign.
But as mentioned earlier, you need to have a sound social media marketing strategy in place to get the desired results.

So, what is a social media marketing strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a gist of things that you intend to do and hope to accomplish on social media. The strategy helps you guide your actions and lets you know whether you are on track or not. From posting, and liking to commenting and replying, everything you do on social media should serve a purpose.

Your social media marketing or SMM strategy should factor in the differences between the social media platforms that are on offer. You need to know what works best for each social media platform. For instance, Twitter is mainly text-based, Instagram is more about pictures and visuals, and Facebook offers multiple content sharing options.

Irrespective of whether you are new to social media or not, you need to have a robust strategy in place to get the maximum out of this revolution for your business. The strategy should include what you intend to achieve and how you plan to go about doing it. You need to know your goals and what you expect to get from each platform. You need to set SMART goals for your business. SMART here stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Some of the important social media marketing goals for businesses include raising brand awareness, connecting with their target audience, selling directly to prospects, increasing traffic, creating leads, and providing customer support.

But how should you go about creating your social media marketing strategy?

Here are some tips that can help you create an effective social media marketing strategy:

Define your target audience – It is important to know your target audience. If you don’t know your target audience, all your marketing activities can go down the drain. You need to do a bit of research on your audience so that you can understand them well. You can create buyer personas – customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, interests, and goals to specifically target your audience.

Have a content strategy – Just being active on social media cannot fetch you great results. You need to have relevant, meaningful, and valuable content for your audience so that they can engage with it. Again, do a bit of research, find out what your audience wants and come up with content that resonates with your audience.

Invest time in competitor research – It is important to know what works on social media. The best way to find out is to invest some time in your competitor’s activities. You might pick up a trick or two for your social media strategy. There is no need to copy your competitors, but you can certainly take the cue from your competitors.

Allocate your budget and resources – Resource allocation and budget are important to the success of your strategy. Your goals should fit your budget and resource allocation. You cannot put your entire team on achieving your social media goals. Also, it is not desirable to ask your sales reps to double-up as social media experts on a part-time basis.

Measure your progress – For any strategy to be successful, it is important to measure your progress. You need to know what you have achieved against the goals you have set for yourself. You have to find out the metrics (number of followers, inbound messages, etc.), and you need to measure your social media marketing efforts. Unless you measure your performance, you cannot fine-tune your efforts.

Align your social activity with your overall goals – Make sure that your social media efforts are aligned to complement your overall marketing goals.

Use social media management tools – You also need to use social media management tools so that it can automate your social posting process and allows you to track your social media efforts. Social media management tools provide reporting and analytics, which helps you to gauge the efficacy of your campaign. With these tools, you can also get useful insights about your audience. You can get to know who all are engaging with your content.

Choose the right channels for your campaign – It is important to choose the right social platform for your social media campaign. It is difficult to get the desired results if your platform selection is not right. You can test various social platforms to see which works best for your business.

Review your performance – It is vital to analyse and review your performance regularly. It is difficult to improve without reviewing your performance.

How to get the attention of your customers?

When it comes to defining your social media marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you select the right channels for your campaign. If your audience doesn’t frequent Instagram, what is the point in choosing it for your social media campaign?

Your social media campaign can only be successful if you get the attention of your customers. That is why it is important to know which social platforms your audience frequents. To drive more engagement, traffic, and sales, you need to target your audience properly.

You can use Google Analytics to find out more about your target audience. You can get to know about demographics, purchase history, and attitudinal behaviours, which can help you customise your social media campaign to get the desired results.

Also, every social media platform has its internal analytics platform that offers further insight into client behaviour. You can find out whether the viewers are interested in reading long text messages, they want to watch videos, or they are interested in statistics. When you know what the viewers want, it helps you to formulate an effective strategy.

You should also not underestimate the power of any social platform if it is giving you the desired results. For instance, it is not always necessary that you will get the best results only on Facebook because it has over two billion users. If your audience is not active on Facebook, it is difficult to get good results.

Which platforms are best for your brand?

Some of the major social media platforms that you should consider for your campaign include:

Facebook – One of the most popular platforms, Facebook was founded in 2004. It allows you to create your Facebook for Business profile, and you can use it effectively to interact with your customers. You can post and share text, images, and videos on Facebook. You can also utilise easy-to-use and helpful Facebook features like instant messaging function and ad creation facility for customer support and product promotion, respectively.

Facebook is an ideal platform for small businesses that get a lot of incoming queries that need to be responded quickly. It is also a good platform for businesses that need to target specific user groups.

According to Statista, 44% of the UK’s online population uses Facebook more than once every day.

Twitter – If you want to increase your user base, Twitter is the ideal platform for your business. Twitter also offers you the opportunity to reach new audiences. Twitter is mainly text-based. You can promote your tweets and run ads. It allows you to write 280 characters in one tweet. Twitter helps you build a direct conversation with your customers.

Twitter is best suited for small businesses because it allows you to share lots of articles and written content. Since twitter is word-based, you can use it to manage customer service inquiries.

According to Statista again, with 14.1 million users, Twitter is one of the most popular platforms that can help you reach your audience effectively.

Instagram – If you want to talk to your customers visually, Instagram is the ideal platform for your business. People on Instagram follow businesses very closely; hence, it is possible to inspire your customers to buy.

Apart from still images, you can also promote videos on Instagram. You can promote your products on Instagram and interact with their communities.

You can also have a dedicated Instagram business account and avail the extra features like contact details and call to action buttons.

If you want to target the younger lot, you should consider using Instagram because most of the population in the age bracket of 18 – 24 and 25 – 34 are on this social platform.
Pinterest – It is another visual platform that allows you to create boards of inspirational images. Whether you sell luxury holidays or offer budget interiors, you have an audience on Pinterest that are ready to grab the offers. You can also share your inspirational content on Pinterest. You can promote your products on Pinterest and buy items from it directly.

Since Pinterest allows you to buy and sell, you can promote your e-commerce business more effectively.

LinkedIn – It is the social media platform for professionals. But you can also promote your business through its Company pages. Its dedicated service for small businesses allows people to locate your business services. You can share content, search for talent, and build communities on Pinterest easily. It allows you to post articles, make a contribution to groups, advertise job opportunities, and connect with your team.

Globally LinkedIn has more than 645 million users in over 200 locations.

YouTube – Video marketing is one of the most popular forms of marketing. If you use video marketing, then you cannot avoid YouTube. You can create your content or run an advertisement campaign on YouTube. Your video content can be accessed by audiences anywhere in the world. Whether you want people to access your informative video content or increase your brand awareness through your video, you can use YouTube to your advantage. You can also make videos to give your users a peep into your production process.

YouTube is one of the most popular social media channels, and businesses find it difficult to avoid this platform. It has a worldwide audience of both males and females across all age brackets.

If you are looking for a social media marketing services company, you should get in touch with vStacks Software Solutions now. We will make sure that you get a robust social media marketing strategy so that it can drive engagement, traffic, and sales for your business.

There is a lot of competition on the internet. If you don’t make a concerted efforted, it is difficult to do well in the online landscape. So, what should website owners do to make themselves more visible on the internet? In case you want to get on top of the competition on the internet, you need to make sure that you have a sound SEO strategy in place. And, a sound SEO strategy typically starts with on-page SEO.

The process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results is known as SEO or search engine optimisation. SEO is divided into two main parts – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. And, if you want to get the best results for your website in terms of traffic, you need to work on both aspects.

So, what is on-page SEO, and how to make sure that your on-page SEO strategy works perfectly for your website?

According to Moz, the process of optimising your web pages to rank higher and earn relevant traffic in search engines is known as on page SEO. As opposed to off page SEO which is all about link building and other external signals, on page SEO deals with both the content and HTML source code of a page which can be optimised.

On page SEO is an evolving phenomenon; hence it is important that website owners keep up with the latest practices. Search engines especially Google are getting smarter by the day; hence you need to keep pace with the changing times.

How to make sure that your on-page SEO strategy works?

Being the owner of the website, you would surely like to rank on the first page of the search engine results. But with the kind of competition that is there on the internet, not every website can make it to the first page. Search engine algorithms are complex, but they are certainly not rocket science. There are ways you can adopt which will help the search engines take note of your website.

What you need is a smart SEO strategy to improve your rankings on the search engines. And, on page SEO is the building block of your SEO strategy.

To make your on-page SEO strategy a hit, here is what you need to do:

• Your URLs should be SEO friendly – According to Google, the first 3 – 5 words in a URL are given more importance. Also, a Backlinko study reveals that short URLs can have an advantage in the search results. Therefore, to make your URLs SEO friendly, they should be short and crisp. Also, make it a practice to include the target keyword in your URL. What you need to do is avoid unsightly and long URLs.
• Your title should start with keyword – Another important SEO strategy is to make sure that your title starts with your chosen keyword. It helps you on two fronts – it helps the search engines to learn quickly about the content of your page, and it also allows the users to pick up the content they are specifically searching for on the internet.
• Make sure that your post title is wrapped in <H1> tag – Another vital on page SEO strategy is to ensure that your title tag is put in <H1> tag. The process allows the search engines to understand better what your is content is about as it helps to highlight some text on your webpage. But what you need to keep in mind is that there should only be one H1 tag per page and that it should contain your target keyword.
• You also need to ensure that you include modifiers in your title – You need to understand the importance of putting in modifiers in the post’s title. A modifier is a word that makes your keyword more precise. For example, using words like best, 2019, checklist, guide, cheap, review, and fast can help you rank higher on the search engines. Modifiers help your target audience know what your post is specifically about as it makes the heading clearer.
• Also, you need to wrap your subheadings in <H2> tags – There are several header tags that can be included in a post. You should include your target keyword in one of the subheadings and ensure that you wrap it in a <H2> tag. The <H2> tags are reserved for subheadings, and it should support your main <h1> tag. When you wrap your keywords in header tags, your post becomes more structured, and the search engines, as well as your readers, can understand it more easily.
• Use multimedia as much as you can – Text alone cannot take your website too far. If you want to decrease your bounce rates and increase your users time on your site (two important user interaction ranking factors), you should add engaging images, infographics, videos, and diagrams to your webpage. Doing this makes the quality of your content better. And, as your content becomes more valuable people most often like to link to such websites.
• Make sure that you include your keyword in the first 100 words – This again is an important one. You should ensure that you include your keyword in the first few lines, more specifically in the first 100 words. So, if you love to write meandering intros before getting down to the subject, then you should cut the practice and make sure that you include your keyword in the first 100 words.
• It is also important that you use responsive design – You should be aware that if your website is not mobile friendly, then search engines like Google penalise your site. What you need is a mobile optimised site if you want to climb the search engine rankings. Hence, what you need to do is make your website responsive. To improve the user experience of your visitors, you need to make your website responsive.
• It is also vital to use internal links – If you want to do well on the search engine rankings ladder, you should start using internal links in your post. Internal links are hyperlinks that your users can click and reach elsewhere from your post on the same page or to some other of your webpage. What you need to do is add 2 or 3 internal links in your post.
• You also need to link to other sites – As it is important for you to link internally, you also need to link to other sites that are in your niche. Outbound links are hyperlinks that your visitors can click and visit a different website. Linking to other websites helps the search engines to understand better which niche your site belongs to, and this, in turn, can improve your search engine rankings.
• Make a habit of writing lengthy posts – Another vital on page SEO strategy is to write lengthy content. Content length is an important ranking factor, and it can improve your search engine rankings. A SEMRush study of ranking factors reveals that the length of the content is among the top nine most important ranking factors.You, of course, do not want your visitors to leave your site in a hurry. When you post long, lengthy, and meaningful content, you give your visitors the reason to engage more with your content.

• Make sure that the load speed of your site is optimised – In case your page takes too long to load, your visitors will leave your site. Also, sites that take too long to load do not fare well on the search engine results. Hence, you need to make sure that your website loads faster. You need to work towards improving the user experience of your visitors.
• Ensure that you include the keyword in the image file name – By now you must be aware of including images in your post. You also need to make sure that you include your keyword in the file names of the images and the alt text. Ensure that one of the images you use has a file name that accommodates your keyword. Also, you should include the keyword in the image alt text.
• You also need to use LSI keywords – Acronym for latent semantic indexing, LSI keywords are words that are related to the keyword you choose. Search engines especially Google uses LSI keywords to determine the relevance of your page. To find the LSI keywords, you should search your keyword on Google and then head to the bottom of the page. When you reach the bottom of the page, you will find “searches related to” section and those are the related keywords.
• Using social sharing buttons also helps – Though it does not affect your ranking directly, but social sharing is bound to generate more eyeballs. And, when your content generates more eyeballs, people are more likely to link to it which increases the value of your content. Hence, it is important that you use social sharing buttons. Place them prominently on your website so that more and more people can share the content.

If you think there is a problem with your on-page SEO, you can get in touch with vStacks Software Solutions now. We are a digital marketing company, and we know what it takes to formulate an effective SEO strategy. From on-page SEO strategy to off-page SEO activities and more, we can help make your website more visible in the online circuit.