As a valuable strategy for marketers, keyword awareness can boost a site's flow of organic traffic as well as engagement metrics.

A few months ago, I was returning from a concert when I noticed a small flier placed on my car window, which read "If you enjoyed this event, lookup [artist name] on Google". It was an ad for another concert organized by the same company whose event I had just attended.

I ended up searching for [artist name] as per the flier on Google a few days later to look for tickets and found myself clicking on the management company's website. While clicking around the site and learning more about their upcoming events, the strategy from a marketing standpoint intrigued me.

The flier was essentially a way to explicitly build keyword awareness, that when searched, would lead to more traffic on the company's website - a feedback loop to generate repeat customers. By encouraging people to research a particular term that they already ranked highly for, the company was able to secure the organic traffic and build engagement. This untapped strategy can build brand awareness and boost engagement metrics for companies that employ it.

Understanding the role of awareness in brand promotion

We understand brand awareness to be the likelihood that consumers recognize the existence and availability of a brand's product or service. Keyword awareness could be similarly described as the likelihood that consumers recognize the existence of search terms. When terms enter the vocabulary of those familiar with a particular topic or industry, they become more likely to use these phrases in their searches, thus increasing the traffic for those sites that were already optimized for the topics.

Marketers can use keyword awareness to drive up their organic search traffic. Similar to the experience above, brands can suggest keywords and promote different terms to particularly receptive audiences and begin to build themselves a strong audience for their particular areas of expertise.

When you build keywords in the minds of consumers, you can help influence both current and future behaviors. For example, if someone sees a list of related search terms on your site, even if they do not choose to click on one right now, they have a higher chance of remembering that term in the future and using it to search. When you rank highly for this term as well, the search will lead them back to your site, helping you to further build your relationship.

Before you can build keyword awareness, however, you have to have an understanding of which terms will align with your target audience's needs. If you're still trying evaluate which related topics will resonate, try our free 30-minute webinar on 3 Steps to Boost Content Marketing Results.

Building keyword awareness

One way to build keyword awareness is to publicize the high-ranking keywords via your product recommendation engine. Typical product recommendation engines calculate the likelihood of a product attracting a visitor’s attention by computing a likability score for related products and ranking them. This is done through a mathematical indexing formula that takes into account the browsing behaviors of other users.

In addition to the browsing behaviors, if the product likability score is made a function of organic keyword search volumes and ranking, marketers could have recommendations that are influenced not just by product likability but also search engine optimized content. In addition, publishing the list of keywords as a social proof-- for example, listing current popular search terms-- reinforces these keywords in the visitors’ minds, thereby creating an organic traffic feedback loop.

A strong keyword awareness campaign can encourage people to visit your site while also boosting the engagement of those who have already landed on your page. Linking to related topics will encourage people to explore more material, keeping them on your page and laying the foundation for a strong relationship.

Improving engagement on your website serves a critical purpose in encouraging more prospects to enter your sales funnel. Customers today are inundated with content and information from a variety of different sources. Experts believe the digital ecosystem will grow from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes by 2020. While the growth in digital usage is beneficial for customers, this means also that brands will have to compete even harder for attention.

Building engagement on your platform will boost your brand recognition and reputation. It lays the foundation for your relationship with the prospect, demonstrating that you can answer their questions and address their needs. Strong engagement metrics can also boost your ranking on the SERPs and encourage more people to enter your sales funnel.

Building keyword awareness and demand with BrightEdge

BrightEdge is a powerful tool that will help you find the right keywords to capitalize on, empowering you to raise awareness for visitors and build the positive feedback loops.

1. Using the BrightEdge API, you can easily pull your top ranking keywords, search volumes and other SEO metrics, out of the BrightEdge platform. This will let you see the terms for which you regularly rank highly.
2. Monitor and measure the search volume and the ranking URLs to better understand the keywords that will be the focus of your keyword awareness campaign. See our on-demand BrightEdge API webinar. 
3. Create a site recommendation engine that uses the data pulled out of the BrightEdge platform, to help bolster your target keywords while using social proof to boost interest in the terms. Link people to content that is likely to interest them, encouraging them to explore more terms and the topics where you excel.
4. Use A/B testing to further optimize your recommendations. Look at a variety of KPIs including how well the recommendations boost engagement, encourage people to enter the sales funnel, and result in repeat customers.

Keyword awareness and demand can be an important part of building an online strategy. By interesting people in your terms and topics, you can encourage them to engage with your brand through your website. Used correctly, it will boost your traffic arriving from organic search engines and it will encourage people to remain on your site longer.

The SEO landscape is always changing – algorithm updates, a shifting competitive landscape – but one thing remains consistent: the need for data-informed keyword research. When done properly, keyword research can expand keywords and produce insights into your market, your competitors’ performance and demand for your product or service.

How we start keyword research and expand keywords at BrightEdge

When one of our customers initially joins BrightEdge, they go through a six-week Onboarding Process in order to “learn the BrightEdge platform, identify goals and work through an Ignite project.” On occasion one of our partners will start Onboarding with a small number of keywords that they want to track. While this is a fine way to start, one of the jobs of the Customer Success team is to build out that initial set of keywords and maximize feature usage and value, so they are on the path to SEO success. Enter BrightEdge’s Data Cube and Striking-Distance Project.

Utilizing the industry’s largest data set to expand keywords and drive keyword research

Launched in March of 2014, the Data Cube “consists of billions of pieces of data, including content, rich media, search terms, and social signals - all at Internet scale - to provide companies with the insights they need to make strategic business decisions.” If you don’t know where to start with keyword research, our recommendation is to always start with the Data Cube. You can focus at the macro-domain level, at the keyword-level or even with one of your category pages. Typically, we will start with a Striking-Distance Project, which in effect looks for low-hanging fruit or keywords within “striking distance” of the first 5 rank positions.

Here’s how it works

First, let’s take into consideration your business objectives. For example, let’s say you want to focus on a category of your site that receives a moderate amount of traffic and has seen increased competition lately. In that case, you would simply enter the URL into the Data Cube and click “Search”.

You will then have the option to drill down into BrightEdge’s vast repository of keywords that are driving users to your category page and all of the pages nested underneath it.

However, since the Data Cube contains such a large data set, some filtering is usually in order. The best place to start is usually filtering out branded terms; this allows you to focus on the higher-priority, non-branded terms that your competition is also targeting. The next step is to focus on keywords that fall within a certain a range, for example, between positions 5 and 20 (i.e., below the fold on page 1 and to the end of the second page). Next, ensure that you’re only focusing on keywords with a sufficient amount of Search Volume. So the last filter is “Search Volume Greater than 1000”.

For a detailed walkthrough on determining the breadth and scope of your keyword strategy, check out our How Many SEO Keywords Should I Manage? video tutorial

This should provide you with the beginning of a short (or, rather long) list of keywords to sift through for relevance and immediately start tracking. Thankfully, that’s as easy as clicking the checkbox on the left of the keyword, and adding it to a keyword group.

Summing it up

At BrightEdge, the Striking Distance Project is a staple of our partners’ success. Utilizing the Data Cube and the simple workflow built into the platform, our partners are able to quickly cut down the amount of time it would take to do a similar project without BrightEdge. In fact, if you calculate the time it would take to complete each of the steps to expand keywords: keyword research (on average, 5-10 hours), optimize your site (on average, 5 hours) and report on progress (on average, 10 hours), with BrightEdge this project for marketing efforts can be done in half the time or less!

Our partners have had great success with the Striking Distance Project for a number or reasons. First, it is the perfect way to become familiar with the platform and the easy-to-use workflow our product and engineering teams have built. Second, by optimizing for keywords that your site is already ranking well for, you can see results much faster than you would by focusing on keywords that are ranking on pages 3 and beyond. Finally, it’s common knowledge that the first five results in Google have the highest click-through rate. By optimizing keywords and pages you are already ranking well for, you will increase your ability to rank better in Google, thereby increasing traffic, conversions and revenue.

When this occurs, the Customer Success team at BrightEdge has fulfilled its task of making our partners look like “rock stars” in their organization while at the same time saving them time. From a Customer Success perspective, that’s a win-win and why we come to work every day.