How Your Sales Funnel Should Tie into Your Keyword Research Strategy

How Your Sales Funnel Should Tie into Your Keyword Research Strategy

What keywords should you target on your website? This is a question that often plagues webmasters. It’s easy to fire up your favorite keyword research tool and find high volume search queries, but figuring out the exact keywords to focus on proves more difficult than you’d imagine. This becomes evident once you factor in user intent and the sales funnel. That’s because keyword research isn’t just about generating traffic. Ultimately, it’s about converting visitors into real customers.

 

What’s the Goal of Keyword Research?

Many webmasters would answer this question by saying that this process is about finding what keywords are used by prospective customers, which in turn allows them to create content accordingly. But there’s more to it than that. You never want to target the wrong keywords. If you go for ultra-competitive keywords, you might not rank at all. And if you focus on super long-tail keywords, you might miss out on a ton of traffic.

What you should remember is that keyword research boils down to figuring out what your target audience wants to find. According to SEO Resellers Canada, having a keen understanding of how your audience thinks can give you an edge both in coming up with the right content and delivering exactly what they need.

 

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The 3 Types of Keywords

To better understand how your target keywords influence your conversions, you need to learn about the three types of keywords based on where they belong in the sales funnel:

  • Top-of-funnel – These keywords are informational in nature (guide to, how to, the best way to)
  • Middle-of-funnel – These keywords seek a solution (ways to fix, how to stop, tips to avoid)
  • Bottom-of-funnel – These keywords have high buyer intent (best, cheap, where to buy)

Categorizing keywords this way can help you glean information about what your audience wants. From there, you can make on-page SEO adjustments and create content based on where the visitors are in the sales funnel.

It can get tricky when you’re deciding what type of keyword to focus on. As a rule of thumb, you should use top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel keywords if you want to establish brand authority. These keywords give you the opportunity to showcase your expertise without necessarily selling your business.

If you have an e-commerce website, then bottom-of-funnel keywords prove to be the most profitable. These keywords are for users who are already in the deeper stages of the buying process. It’s only a matter of giving them that extra nudge to compel them to choose you instead of the competition.

 

 

Creating a Mind Map

Of course, you have the option of using any of the different types of keywords. In order to be more strategic, you’d want to create a mind map to trace the trail your visitors follow through your site. Basically, your goal is to attract traffic to your top-of-funnel pages, lead them to the middle-of-funnel pages, and get them to click on your bottom-of-funnel content.

Following this simple technique can give you a significant boost in conversion rates. It reminds you that keyword research should never be limited to picking search queries that get the highest search volume. Finding out where the users currently stand in the buying process based on the keywords they use is far more valuable.