The million dollar question that get asked frequently — how do I start a digital marketing campaign on Google Adwords, or build a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and marketing content strategy. All these tactics are in high demand since they are closely related to the biggest content influencer, Google.

What drives Google? Meaningful content. What makes a successful digital marketing campaign? Yes! You guessed it — meaningful content i.e. relevant keywords!

I have prepared 6 easy steps that will help you to discover your golden keywords that will help you build your digital marketing campaigns that will resonate with your audience.

BUT! Before you start on this journey, please promise me you won’t skip ahead. The way I’ve structured this process will help you to keep your keywords focused and authentic — the main ingredients for successful content marketing.

Step 1: Write down your business’s product(s) or service values.

This might sound simple, but you will be surprise how many freelance clients and companies I have worked, don’t have a clear product and service value. For example my value proposition as Digital Marketing Strategist is:

— to provide actionable recommendations to build a stronger digital presence.

Step 2: Describe what makes your product or service different — what problem are you solving? For example, I help business owners build their digital presence by:

Offering a Free 1 hour consultation meeting to go over 3 Digital Marketing Action Items based on a Digital Marketing audit.

Step 3: Who is your audience?

My audience are startups and small business who need to build a stronger digital presence.

Step 4: Time to identify your competition — Direct and indirect. This step will help you to evaluate their digital presence, and identify their value proposition, more importantly the KEYWORDS they are using.

Here are some tools that will help you to evaluate your competition. These tools are easy to use, and very intuitive:

similarweb.com | SEO Inspector Firefox plug-in | wordtracker.com/inspect | neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer

For my competition, I was able to identify the following keywords: Consultant Digital marketing, Freelance SEO, Consultant E-commerce & web marketing, expert Wordpress / Magento, Marketing online.

Before we move to the next step, by now you should a good idea of your initial keyword research based on step 1 to 4. For example mine for far are the following:

digital presence, build a stronger digital presence, digital marketing audit, digital marketing action Items, digital marketing strategist, free digital marketing 1 hour consultation, startups, small business, local business, consultant Digital marketing, freelance SEO, consultant e-commerce & web marketing, expert Wordpress and Magento, online marketing focused on results.

By now you have a solid and authentic list of keywords based on product and service!

Step 5: It is time to add more diversity to your keyword list. The following FREE tools will help you to expand and get keywords suggestions, and ideas for how people are searching for your product(s) or service(s).

The main advantage of these tools are that they offer options based on languages, country, and a combination search tools such Google and Bing.

answerthepublic.com | infinitesuggest.com | neilpatel.com/ubersuggest

Other sources that can be very useful is your Google search console which shows you how people found your site using Google.

Step 6: Time to evaluate your keywords list!

The following tools will help you to identify the keywords that will bring you closer to your audience and build more effective digital campaigns

semrush.com paid tool, but they offer a free 7 day trial.

adwords.google.com Adwords Keyword Planner

After you have selected the keywords that best represent your product or service it is time to use and sprinkle them on the all different digital marketing campaigns and channels. Remember be wise in how you use them! If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach me.

About me: I’m a passionate Digital Marketing Strategist with experience executing web and e-commerce strategies, managing teams with diverse backgrounds, and meeting tight deadlines for high-visibility projects.

The main intention for this blog post is NOT to make you an overnight SEO expert. My main goal is to give quick guidelines that will help you to keep researching. Basically, I’m giving you the “keywords” to SEO heaven for your website.

Let’s get started! SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it is the process of getting traffic organically through search engines. I will even dare to say it’s an evolving form of art, and it’s very difficult to keep up, but isn’t IMPOSSIBLE please don’t give up mid-way. Let’s dig in to what you need to know.

First of all, before you launch your website make sure you have set up:

Google analytics tracking code

Google search console with a sitemap file, which helps Google see what your site is about.

List your business in Google My business as well as any online directories. Please make sure you list your business information (name, address, phone number) with the same format — letter for letter, space, capital & lowercase letters.

Do keyword research based on your website content — Adwords planner is a free tool that can help you discover what keywords people are using to search for your product or services. Be authentic and only pick keywords that reflect the true essence of your business.

Once you have carefully curated your keywords is time to use them in the following elements on your website:

Page Title: include keywords, don’t use more than 60 characters, use your company name. Write a phrase that can answer the HOW, WHAT & WHY. Lastly, keep it simple.

Links: Use your keywords separated with hyphens as part of your links — Don’t over do it only use the keyword that is related to the content of your page. (For example, www.yourcompany.com/about-company-name for the “About Us” page of your website)

Meta descriptions: It’s a brief description of what your web page is all about. Be honest, meaningful, and more importantly brief — no more than 150–160 characters, and include your searched keywords.

Page header — H1: Make sure you have one on each of your web site’s pages.

Meaningful content: Use your keywords in your first paragraph, without compromising the meaning or readability of your content.

Links: If it’s possible, add links to other trustworthy websites, but only if it’s related to your content and adds value for the reader.

Website images: Name your website images with the keywords that are related to the image, and always add ALT tags that describes the image, this will help your images show in Google Image search results.

Lastly, it’s important that your website have the following attributes:

Use responsive design on your website

Never ever have duplicated content

Test your site’s page loading speed — it should take less than half of a second — we are talking about milliseconds!

Have Markup(s) — they are an embedded code that helps the search engines top display organic information on their search results.

Voilà! Now you have a quick guideline of the most basic SEO elements. Your next steps should be to get more knowledgeable on each elements, and start getting your SEO keywords that are essential for your website’s page titles, meta descriptions, page headers, and content creation. If you have any questions — please ask away! Let’s connect & be part of the conversation #digitalclues

About me: I’m a passionate Digital Marketing Strategist with experience executing web and e-commerce strategies, managing teams with diverse backgrounds, and meeting tight deadlines for high-visibility projects.