Keyword Research, Search Engine Optimization and the Customer Journey

Putting keyword research and SEO at the core of your business strategy can change the way that you align your marketing activities with the customer journey to create new and unique opportunities.

In this article we explore the link between keyword research, SEO and marketing. We will challenge the traditional view of the customer journey which tries to find a market for an existing product, and look at it from the point of view of the customer.

The Customer Journey

The typical customer journey is often viewed as starting out quite passively (Awareness) and ending with the active Advocacy of a product.

However, with the advent of search engines comes an opportunity to turn this Awareness into more active participation.

Rather than creating a product, and then trying to make the market Aware of it, keyword research allows us to approach marketing the other way round.

Given that at any one time, our prospective customers are researching solutions to their problems, it seems only logical to use their own queries to fuel the product development process.

Not only that, but if we are producing me-too products, we can see what kinds of comparison points the market feels are important, which will help to design the solution as well as give us a conversation in which to participate once the product has been created.

In fact, this conversation between the market and the search engines and social media platforms is present at every stage of the customer journey:

• Awareness: as soon as the market knows that something exists, they start to look for alternatives;
• Consideration: once the market becomes convinced of the merits of the products on sale, they then start to look for confirmation that there are valid options on the market;
• Purchase: having made the decision to buy, the market will look for the best option to acquire the product as a function of price, availability, service, etc.;
• Retention: subsequent conversations between the market and the business will fuel an ongoing process of refinement, and constant attempts to increase the value of the relationship in both directions;
• Advocacy: customers will generate conversations that can be leveraged as content in their own right (testimonials, for example) or new opportunities to develop the relationship further (products, services, and so forth).

At each of the five stages above, there are opportunities for keyword research and SEO to work together to help propel the business forward.

Keyword Research, SEO & the Customer Journey

Using a niche keyword research service such as those offered by The Keyword Coach enables you to pick the market's brain and build up a picture of what's important to your future customers. Your basket of keyword phrases is a resource upon which entire businesses can be built.

The Keyword Coach treats keyword research and search engine marketing as strategic resources, rather than merely a part of your online presence. As such, they are constantly evaluated in terms of internal and external context, how they can be deployed (using a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle), and integrated with the strategy of the organisation.

One example of this is performing Amazon niche site keyword research for product owners (including authors). Amazon is not only a marketplace, but also a search engine, with almost all the features that a traditional search engine has, including auto-suggest.

Coupled with using an indexing engine like Google, it is possible to leverage user generated content as well as marketing content to take advantage of the conversations that are created during the customer journey: from their initial discovery of a product, asking questions about it and eventually leaving reviews.

All of these interactions use key words to describe aspects of the product, both positive and negative, and keeping track of them will help create real opportunities.

In a larger context, the same processes can be used to track customer conversations both on the organisation's site, in social media, and through search engines in order to help make strategic decisions as to what to take to market, where to concentrate efforts and picking the best time to launch.

Amazon PLR Keyword Research Cheat Sheet: A Worked Example for Nutribullet vs. Breville Blend Active

Recently, I was putting together some juicer versus blender PLR, and happened across a great technique for generating quick traffic based on products that Amazon customers are actually looking for!

The following is a cheat sheet that should help you to quickly pick, compare and write about products that are sure to rank well and be popular.

In addition, using my keyword evaluation techniques from the SEO tutorials, you can also be sure that they represent money in the niche, ready to be spent.

Step 1: Most Wished For vs. Most Gifted

Amazon maintains lost of best-seller lists, and while the main list tells you what's hot right now, the Most Wished For and Most Gifted lists often tell a different story.

For example, Most Wished For products have a market that knows what it wants, and is likely sharing that with other people -- friends and family mainly -- who are looking to buy them a gift.

Most Gifted is a response to wishes, plus an insight into what people actually spend their money on.

So, you should look for two items that figure highly in both lists, but which aren't the same (for a versus piece) or which are complementary (for an up-sell piece).

In the image on the right, I've highlighted the related products which can be pitched one against the other, with a little research.

In the bottom left of that image, you'll also see a complementary product for the Breville Active Blend -- a bottle that has been gifted a substantial number of times.

This kind of market intelligence tells you a lot about the target market and how you can create content that will generate interest. But what it doesn't tell you is which keywords to target.

Step 2: AdWords Research

This is where we bring in the AdWords Keyword Planner.

Regular readers will know that this is my current go-to tool for the raw evaluation of keywords, despite being a Market Samurai affiliate, simply because most other tools get their data from either the AdWords or Google databases.

A simple search reveals that (at the time of writing, and for the UK market) Nutribullet as a keyword out-pulls Breville Active Blend by about 35 times. Plus, a review of the suggested keywords shows that there is also more advertising money being spent across a wider spread of keyword phrases for Nutribullet than for the Breville.

This makes sense: the Nutribullet is more than twice the price, and therefore it's likely that with the brand attachment that seems to come with it, there's more money to be made by selling them.

But we can't ignore the facts: the Breville is more often wished for, and its accessory (a spare bottle) is more often gifted.

With high traffic, and relatively high advertising spends, the stage is set for a Nutribullet vs. Active Blend project. So, what do people actually want to know?

Step 3: Question Research

This is where we start to think about the hungry market. We want to know if there are any burning questions that the prospects need to know the answer to before choosing one or the other.

I start with the underdog -- the Breville in this case.

The tool of choice is KeywordTool.io; there are others, but I happen to like the no-nonsense interface that it offers.

On the right is the result of a quick search for questions on 'Breville Blend Active' for the UK market, as reported by Google.

You'll note that I've highlighted the four specific questions that related to the product that we have already seen in the Most Wished For / Most Gifted list.

This is important, because it tells us that people are looking for, and then buying the bottles that go with the Blend Active.

We could stop here, and create a whole micro site all about Breville bottles. But, there's more!

The next step is to to the same query for Nutribullet. This time, instead of 11 suggestions, Keyword Tool returns over 130.

The question is, where is the overlap?

The answer is that there are many. Just a few:

• ... crush ice
• ... blend nuts
• ... dishwasher
• where to buy ...

More importantly, there are a whole bunch of questions specific to the Nutribullet, but which could equally be asked for the Blend Active, such as 'is ... just a blender', and 'is ... worth the money'.

Part of the keyword research phase of SEO is in finding these crossovers, as they both give you something to write about, and also widen your market.

Some will be worthwhile, others not so much, so the final phase is to evaluate those phrases that will generate traffic.

Step 4: Keyword Evaluation

This is an easy one:

• research the questions on Keyword Tool
• copy and paste them into Keyword Planner
• sort by 'Page Views'
• export the results

You now have a list of the most popular keyword phrases. If you're feeling keen, you can even take the resulting spreadsheet, and devise a formula to work out which will be the best in terms of the traffic, competition, and advertising spend, but a first cull based on raw traffic is a good way to start.

Step 5: The Content Plan

The longest part of the process is to create 10 to 15 blog or article titles that reflect the keyword phrases chosen, and then three to five headings that are related to the theme of the piece, and leverage other related keywords.

Add that's it for the keywords. The usual advice holds for modern SEO practices; don't go overboard, trust semantic search to pick up the sense from the natural language and make sure that wherever the reader thought they were going to get, you actually deliver.

So, with five easy steps, you should now have enough material to promote (and even cross-promote) products on Amazon that are bang on trend. At least for now.

Don't forget that Amazon updates the Best Seller, Most Gifted and Most Wished for lists frequently, so if you find one that is a constant source of inspiration, set up a page change monitoring service so that you are alerted every time the lists are re-published.