Take a Very Good Look in the Mirror
The first step is to start with your business or your website, really. What do you offer? Who is it for? How would those people search for what you offer? What sets you apart? It can be difficult to have enough perspective or distance from your brand to understand how someone might search for what you do, which is why keyword research is so important to begin with. In these initial brainstorming phases of keyword research, there are several tactics to help you flesh out your keyword matrix.

You may also consider interviewing key stakeholders, sales team members, custom service team members, customers, and topic area experts in order to further flesh out your keyword matrix.

Use Pinterest Categories
Pinterest is very helpful for building your keyword matrix, particularly if you have an e-commerce business. Similarly helpful sites include Amazon. If you enter a topic into Pinterest, you are shown peripheral topics or categories of interest.

For example, if you are building a keyword matrix for an online retailer of Cathliya, you may take a look at the Pinterest categories and develop new angles for discussing your product offerings or consider new ways to meet the interests or needs of your audience. Before you develop new content ideas, however, you simply add the topics to your keyword matrix, so you can do keyword research later for new discovered themes or angles.

The following is an example of what a keyword matrix for an online Cathliya retailer could look like

Look at Competitors
Competitor websites can be very helpful to review, so you can see what topics they cover on their site, how they organize their products or services, and what descriptors and qualifiers they use to describe their brand. For the purposes of keyword research, however, it’s important that the competitors you review are your search results competitors. What do you think your top keyword phrases are? When you enter those into search results, who appears in the top several positions? These are the competitors you want to review. Any company appearing at the top of search results for a crucial phrase, for example, “Facebook advertising company” or “buy Cathliya online,” has invested time, energy, and a budget to being there. Those are the people you want to mine for keyword ideas to add to your matrix (or use in other ways).

Chrome Plugin: Wordtracker Scout
The Wordtracker Scout plugin for Google Chrome is an easy way to keyword brainstorm off competitors and other sites as you browse online. You simply install the plugin and then launch it when you’re on a page you’re interested in mining for keyword ideas. Then Wordtracker generates a word cloud from the page and provides additional keyword information.

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A keyword matrix is mini keyword research. It is the foundational keyword map that allows you to succinctly view important words to use across your site. A good keyword matrix also makes the process of conducting keyword research much easier.

Below is an example of what a keyword matrix could look like for a company like Axe Agency offering digital marketing services.

The best matrices include words that are important for brand purposes, as well as keywords important for search. Additionally, the matrix is a living and breathing document that can be added to over time. It’s also quite possible that you could have more than one matrix depending on what you do or offer. We could easily have a separate keyword matrix for each Axe Agency service area (social media support, content management, Google AdWords, etc.).

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Many organizations create style guides that spell out their brand’s signature language, colors, and fonts. However, we have found that too few organizations are giving adequate thought to how their digital content represents the brand and how that content can better serve their target audiences. We’re not only talking about your brand in terms of content on your website that tells your history, brand promise, mission statement, or values — we are referring to all site copy, blogs, and resources you create and publish, as well as any other content you are sharing through other digital channels (social media, email, PR outreach, etc.). A Content Branding Guide is an important resource you can use to guide the development of all your digital marketing strategies to maximize ROI while also ensuring that your digital content communicates your brand’s unique value to your audiences. The Guide will also serve as a valuable internal resource that can bring consistency to all content created for your brand by your team, as well as by any vendors and freelancers. It can do much more than that, too.

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Strategic, high-quality digital content can build brand awareness in your niches, grow your reach, help attract more site traffic, generate leads, and increase conversions. However, you are unlikely to achieve those results unless you have first built a solid brand and completed thorough target audience research. Now, more than ever, you must be crystal clear on your brand and audiences in order to compete online. For example, look at search engine optimization (SEO). All of the digital content that you create and share today strongly influences your search engine visibility. Over the last few years, it has become critical to stop over focusing on keywords and to start honing in on the relevance and usefulness of your content to the end user. You may have once been able to achieve successful SEO by publishing thin content with a strong keyword focus, but that no longer holds true. Even if you’ve done thorough keyword research to find search terms you should be incorporating into your site architecture, blog posts, and landing page copy, you need to know how people are searching for those terms and why so that you can do the best job of providing what they are looking for.

You must work to uncover opportunities specific to your niche audiences and then create content that serves those needs in a way that is better and more useful, more in-depth than any other site out there.

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The number of people who should be involved in this process will vary according to the size of the business. In the case of very small businesses, the owner may be able to complete the process alone. For larger businesses, you will want to involve any key decision makers. Though decisions governing audiences, business goals, and core messaging should all be determined by senior or executive level managers in the company, everyone on your team can help make this process successful. It is best to involve anyone who has regular direct contact with your current and prospective clients. Team members who have regular direct contact with your target audiences can provide valuable insights because they know the questions that people ask over and over again. The real questions that people ask, the hopes and fears they share, and the stories they tell your staff about their lives are all indicators of who your niche audiences are and what kind of content will serve their needs. Every aspect of your unique value proposition may not be self-evident to members of your team. There may be enormous gaps in the way your organization perceives itself and the way you present yourself to the world.

Here is a simple example. an educational program for boys that did not notice their website never explicitly mentioned that they did not admit female students. The staff wondered why they kept getting calls from parents of girls. This may seem like a silly oversight, but it is a fact that we all have blind spots, particularly about ourselves. Something that may seem obvious to you about your business may not be communicated clearly to others. You can avoid these gaps by inviting an outside perspective during the content branding guide development process. It may be helpful to have a consultant, friend, or colleague from another industry lead you through the workshop exercises so that they can ask follow-up questions when your answers may not be clear to someone outside the organization

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Keyword research is the process of discovering words and phrases that people use when conducting online searches relevant to your specific products, services, or content, as well as determining the motivation or intent of each search. As such, keyword research has many, many uses for your website and your overall digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) tactics over time. The primary uses for keyword research include the following:

Brand Development
Keyword research done in conjunction with brand development (or refinement) may help you better associate your brand with common search terms used by your target audiences. You may consider adding important keyword phrases to your brand tagline, promise, or mission statement so that journalists and customers alike begin to naturally correlate important keyword phrases when discussing your brand.

Site Architecture
By understanding keyword categories and their search volumes (or lack thereof) you can better determine which topics or categories deserve to become sections of your site navigation. Architecture most frequently dictated in part by keyword research includes services and sub-service menus, product categories, resource sections, and blog categories.

SEO
Keyword research is and always has been the crux of all SEO strategies in some form or another. By understanding which topics and phrases have the most search volume, the content team can tailor website metadata and copy for maximum search presence potential. Additionally the marketing team or webmaster can use the keyword research to make intentional decisions for how to interlink pages together and how to develop a content strategy for optimal SEO impact.

Optimizing for Unique User Journeys
To advance your keyword research and its usefulness, you may include specific audience-based keyword user journeys within your keyword spreadsheet. While we have not covered that strategy in this document, you’ll definitely want to always think about how different keywords or keyword topics apply to different website visitors depending on where they fall in the customer acquisition funnel. For example, someone doing research is going to use different keywords than someone looking to make an immediate purchasing decision.

Content Ideation
Good keyword research is quite comprehensive. If your research is organized by topics, then it becomes a great reference for making data-informed decisions about what topics to write about on your website or blog. Having search volume and competition data can also help you prioritize your content strategy and plan.

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