I honestly believe that, what sets successful SEO campaigns apart, is the ongoing focus on research: content, keywords, competitors, technical on-site SEO, target group, etc.
Research is so important that we even created a completely separate product that just covers research, which we call Target Research.
Beyond Keyword Research
Now, when it comes to SEO or SEM, everybody knows about keyword research, where you try to find the keywords a lot of potential clients use to search online.
Target Research, however, for me goes a lot further:
Rather than finding lists of keywords using some tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, keyword.io, answerthepublic or keywordshitter.com and more, Target Research for us means touching base with our client's potential future clients directly where they are:
- Quora.com
- YouTube
- Facebook groups
- Niche forums
We manually harvest them all, in order to find EXACTLY HOW people talk about our client's industry there.
From Keywords to Topics
While keyword research stays on a keyword level, we want to identify which topics are important to them, and how do they enquire about those topics, what angles do they address, and what are the usual responses they get.
This enables us then to have enough "seed material" for both, a keyword research and a topic list for a projected content map, where we line up the next 25-50 topics we suggest a client should be creating, including their structure with internal linking and more.