Keyword Research Is Not Just For Search Engine Marketers
Keyword research is one of a number of skills that any decent SEO or search marketer has to be good at in order to be successful. But are they the only ones who should be aware of keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker?
Information architects, content writers, and usability professionals are just a few job titles, aside from SEOs, that need to be using tools like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to conduct a core component of their services.
Keyword Research for Usability
A big part of usability is making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for on your site, and navigate to the content they are trying to reach. As a usability expert you need to know how users think and how they’ll navigate and "use" your site. Keyword research is arguably the best way of finding out how users think when navigating the web. How do people search for your product or service? Do they commonly use industry acronyms and slang or is that left to industry professionals? As a usability consultant you’ll need to find this information when planning the links, content, and navigation of the site. Keyword research tools are among the best tools for this sort of research.
Keyword Research for Copywriting
A vital skill in copywriting is being able to communicate and speak to your user in language they use and understand. You need to be able to connect with them and make them think while they’re reading the content on your web site. If the copy on your site is going over their head, then it won’t work. Don’t use complicated or technical language that your users won’t recognize when you can keep it simple and write your content in their words. Once you work with a keyword research tool, you may find that a lot of people do search for your product or services using technically-advanced words and slang and that means you can use those types of words in your content, but most often you’ll find that you need to keep things simple and not try to impress your users with how well your content is written, but how well it speaks to them.
A lot of writers just like to write incorporating college-level vocabulary into their work and over-using adjectives that can really lose the attention of your audience on the web. The web is a unique medium not just because of how you navigate it, but also because of the attention span of a typical user. Most web users are inpatient and need to be sold to or communicated with quickly. Don’t drag out your message with content that doesn’t connect to your users immediately, in their language.
Keyword Research for Information Architects
How do you name the different sections of your site? Everyone has an "About Us" page on their site that provides background information on the company. Sometimes this page is called "About Us", "Company", "Profile" or "Firm". How do you choose which term to use? Do some keyword research.
In the web industry, I’ve found that people search for words like "web design company" much more than "web design firm" and rarely do people search for web development companies using the word "about" in their search phrase – so maybe it’s best to use the word "company" in your main navigation and refer to yourself as a "company" as opposed to a "firm" or "agency". Doing your keyword research will point this out to you and will help you make decisions on what keywords to use on your site and how to incorporate them into your navigation.
Bringing It All Together
As you start looking at this keyword research and incorporating language into your content, your internal links, your navigation, and overall site architecture you’ll find that a large part of your optimization is complete. Your SEO tasks will then consist of crafting title and META tags, creating internal links and doing some of the technical work like setting up redirects and rewriting, removing duplicate content, and ensuring that the site is crawlable - but much of the editing and fine tuning of content will be completed. Leaving less work for you as an SEO.
This also shows the advantages of having skills in each of these areas of web development. A lot of programmers have really bad usability skills, and a lot of writers, well, write a lot. Being a great SEO means having a strong knowledge of usability, writing, and content architecture and keyword research tools are a strong asset in every aspect of developing your web site strategy.
