As businesses mature they tend to spend a lot of time refining their keyword strategy. This approach includes looking at existing keywords and measuring their performance in various ways.
Inspecting and managing keyword performance is important, but in our ever-changing world, defining (or re-defining) your keyword mix can be equally important.
In fact, this may just be the most important part of “refining” your strategy, especially in our ever-changing world of technology.
How Did You Originally Define Your Keyword Strategy?
Assuming you did it correctly, you probably originally established your keyword mix by answering a few simple questions, like:
1) What are we really good at?
2) What do we want to do more of?
3) What makes us successful?
Now there are more questions we could ask, like “what is really profitable for us?” or “what do our customers love?” and these are good sub-questions to ask. But in essence, they pretty much fall under the three questions above, or some variation of those.
The objective here is not to limit yourself to three questions, but rather to take a sometimes overcomplicated idea and make it simple.
In the world of B2B software consulting for example, a system integrator might have a difficult time just answering those three questions (believe me, I know) because the answers are pretty much in a state of constant flux.
Software partners are constantly changing their licensing or pricing structures, new versions and new features constantly come to market. New acquisitions can come into play, new talent appears, and opportunities for new business (along with prospect focus) can change fairly regularly.
Keyword Content Gets Indexed More Quickly
In the early days of SEO, the time it took to for spiders to index a new page or keyword change was typically about 60 days. But today, with the prolific growth of search engine spiders, databases and algos, content changes or additions can take effect in search results much more quickly.
In the case of social media, ideas or offers can be seen immediately, and promoted across multiple networks. And, in our webmaster tools accounts, we can ask Google to “fetch” our changes literally on demand.
Today, it’s a matter of days, even hours (not months) for content to be indexed, liked or shared.
How Will You Refine Your Keyword Strategy?
While some businesses stick to a branding strategy of consistent keywords that speak to their unique and enduring strengths, not all businesses are so lucky as to have earned the status and brand recognition required to rest on their laurels.
There is no truer proof of this than in the very competitive realm of technology development – because inevitably (and by definition) technology is always changing .
So we always have to re-evaluate our original questions, with our emphasis placed on the context of “TODAY”.
What are we really good at TODAY?
Our business has probably evolved (even traditional businesses do, to some extent) since we established our original keyword mix. We have probably hired new people, developed new talents, created new offerings and opened up new markets as a result.
This is an excellent time to practice the art of story telling on our company blog, which articulates that evolution – rich with those new keywords. Who are the champions of these positive changes? Can we tap into their expertise to really tell the story accurately and credibly?
What do we want to do more of TODAY?
We ask this important question because the reasons behind “why we want to do more of this” can be many, and not so obvious. There may be strategic partnerships that could be strengthened, there could be new, high margin opportunities available, or certain strategic rewards could be enabled, that are beyond the surface.
Again, leadership within the company deserves to be aware of the power of a refined keyword strategy toward furthering these goals – both those that are apparent, and those which have a deeper long term purpose. We can guess at the obvious, but we have to ask the question before the answer “either surprises us or not”. If we are surprised, even a little, the question was well worth asking.
What makes us successful?
This open ended question is meant to be more thought-provoking than the knee-jerk response of “making money”. Sure, the profit motive is a very important consideration, but what gets us there? Happy customers? Happy employees? Happy partners? Happy regulators? So when we put some thought into this, it’s again worth devoting some time to the less obvious answers.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with devoting a blog post or a social mention to something that indirectly contributes to your success, especially if you want to build that enabler and grow that aspect of your business.
By starting with a simple foundation when defining your original keyword strategy, and by asking the right key people the right questions TODAY, you’ll have an organic, evolving keyword strategy that always taps into the relevance of your evolving business strategy.
Refining your keyword mix is certainly pertinent to the larger SEO strategies we talk about in other articles. In fact, you’ll probably notice a common thread among all our articles which support the larger idea of a comprehensive marketing strategy.
In that comprehensive strategy, each component strengthens the other, so that you are leveraging specific best of class techniques to support the broader strategy.
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