If you are familiar with the basics of digital marketing, you must know what keywords mean and what its importance in digital marketing is. Keywords hold the power to make or break the ranking of your website.

An effective keyword research strategy is one of the most important skills every digital marketer must have or develop.  Generating relevant keywords for SEO and PPC is not enough, it must be used smartly in the content; only then your complete SEO and PPC strategy can become a success.

Here are a few things that you must know before doing a keywords research and using them in the content.

Know your audience

It is very important that you know your targeted audience. You need right kind of visitors to your page not just any random traffic. For this to work, you need to put yourself into your reader’s shoes and understand what keywords they would use to search for the products or services you deal in. Look for the posts on social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc.

It’s good to get suggestions

There are various online tools that help you know the top autocomplete for different search engines and other websites. You can use various such tools and get the best suggestions. Not all of them might be relevant keywords, but you can sure use some. Along with that you’ll be sure that you have not missed any.

Stay updated with the trends

Keep on surfing the internet and learn what is trending in the market. Visit your competitors’ pages and see what they are writing about. Looks for latest updates and researches done by various forums. Use your analytics tool, Google Webmaster tool and other tools to see what search terms people are looking for.

When your keyword pool gets ready

After all the research you have done, you’ll have a long list of keywords. Go through all of them and list which keywords to use where. You can form a list of long tail keywords and phrases which you can use in multiple ways.

Keeping the balance

There are two types of keywords – short keywords (or head terms) and long tail keywords. Head terms have a very high competition because those are the basic terms related to the products or services. While, long tail keywords have less competition but are less likely to get searched. The better you understand your target audience, the better long tail keywords you can create and use.

Don’t stuff the keywords

Knowing the latest updates Google brings every now and then, it is clear that content relevancy matters more than the keyword density. Your webpage gets ranked only if your content interesting, knowledgeable, justifies the topic and has maintained the keyword density.

Know what your audience is looking for and build your complete keywords strategy around it, you’ll definitely see success coming your way. C’mon, let’s get started!