From start to finish, keyword research, optimisation and strategy is a technique which aims to give your brand the best chance of success in search. By establishing a comprehensive list of commercial and informational keywords, brands can ensure that their brand is present in search results not just for terms important to the industry, but important to your consumers.

Once this list is established, you can then optimise your site and existing content to better reflect keyword themes and topics in addition to single trophy terms, and ensure your content is as useful and well understood as possible for and by both consumers and search engines.

Either following this, or concurrently, you can then plan how you can supplement existing content to bridge gaps and create content which offers the best possible experience for your consumers (see our user focused content service).

As the Google algorithms have improved in their ability to understand topics and context and user intent, there has been less importance placed on the role of keywords in SEO. Yet, while Google’s advances free our writers to express themselves with fluency and style – and without worrying so much about specific keywords – keywords cannot be overlooked from the perspective of a potential consumer.

Keyword research may not be important just as a list of things to include anymore, but it does provide a guide – of themes and topics, of words and, therefore, synonyms that can communicate your importance to specific search queries to the search engines and users that are looking for you. For that reason, keyword research unlocks a whole world of possibilities – far from being restrictive, keyword research can be liberating and offer a huge scope for improving content.

The same goes for optimisation and strategy – the more keywords you have in your list, the more able you are to build content strategies that capitalise on keyword themes, and optimise existing content meet the needs of your users.

Keyword performance audit

This audit uses Google Search Console and Google Analytics data to review current organic keyword and top content performance. Through this audit we’re able to identify which pages and keywords are already performing well for your brand, and highlight the opportunities available for strong converting keyword themes. This is a prerequisite for your keyword research and allows us to enhance the keyword strategy planning for your brand by enabling our experts to build on what is working, and increase the focus on more immediate opportunities.

Keyword research

Our extensive keyword research phase takes advantage of multiple industry leading tools to develop the best possible understanding of what your consumers are looking for; not just for commercial terms, but for informational queries, problems and points of interest – these are the things that will help them to make the right choices when looking for the products and services you supply, and help to build trust and the perception of subject authority.

By making sure that keyword research is thorough and bespoke, Click Consult ensures that the brands we work with are present in the places consumers are looking and unlocks a world of possible content opportunities and ways to build a trust and authority with consumers.

Keyword strategy planning document

We feel this document is vital for effective organic search; outlining a new, optimised strategy to improve performance of existing pages, our keyword strategy planning document details issues, optimisations and opportunities for creating new pages (if applicable), all of which can improve the website.

Search demand curve

While competing for trophy keywords is an ambition for all brands, quite often the top terms in any industry vertical are generic and lacking in purchase intent. While that doesn’t prohibit competing for such terms, at Click Consult we believe that it makes sense to pursue the 70% of searches that fall outside the fat head and chunky middle.

This 70%, the long tail, contains not only more opportunity for improving overall visibility but also hyper targeted terms that are more likely to feature at the purchase level of the sales funnel. As such, and using a comprehensive keyword discovery process, we identify the best long tail keywords to achieve your ambitions and drive ROI.

Long tail targeting (or long tail keyword strategy) is a longstanding SEO technique that has been given a new lease of life by advances in the way we search. The ‘long tail’ here refers to a distribution chart tracking the popularity of keywords (search volume) against the number of total searches. This distribution led to the popularisation of three terms in SEO:

  • Fat head – trophy keywords, the most popular search terms in any niche; these are typically difficult to rank for, but are searched far more than any other.
  • Chunky middle – these represent less of a struggle to rank for, but are less popular search terms overall.
  • Long tail – these search terms actually make up around 70% of search volume overall, but are far less often searched individually. They also tend to have a far greater indication of intent, making them great targets both for achievable rankings and for earning targeted, mid-low funnel traffic.

In addition to providing low competition, highly targeted opportunities, long tail keywords are also far more in keeping with how people search using voice activated devices. The rise of digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant – and the level of investment in voice search from top tech firms – reinforce the growing importance of voice search and, consequently, of long tail and conversational searches.

As mentioned, there are a number of potential benefits to implementing well-developed keyword research, optimisation and strategy. Not only can you unlock a host of potential targets and identify the 70% of all searches that you may miss when using a less thorough and bespoke approach, you can also find untapped, high purchase intent searches, and a host of searches with low competition a high potential for conversion. Added to this, the level of ‘future proofing’ that comes from optimising properly for the more conversational style of search users are shifting toward (and as a consequence for a voice friendly future of search), a thorough commitment to keyword research, optimisation and strategy can offer a lot both immediately and as an investment – enabling you to:

Click Consult's SEO team hard at work

Our 20 years of search and digital marketing experience has taught us a lot, but such experience is hardly necessary to see the continued importance of keywords. Our experts use only the top tools to explore the wider context of your brand and the information your consumers want to find.

Employing an extensive research method, our experts will tailor a bespoke strategy for your brand’s unique ambitions so that you can relax in the knowledge that your brand will be present where your consumers are looking.

Organic search, commonly referred to as search engine optimisation (SEO), employs a combination of creative and technical skills to improve the visibility of a website for commercially important key terms. In doing so, the aim is to increase the number of consumers exposed to a brand at vital points in the consumer journey, to increase traffic to the website and, therefore, increase consumer awareness and the number of commercial actions (purchases, downloads, contact form submissions etc).

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