Inbound Marketing For Dummies

Chapter 7

Discovering Customer Needs with Keywords

In This Chapter

Understanding keywords as consumers’ stated needs

Performing keyword research

Assigning keywords to buyer’s place in the purchase path

Segmenting keywords for maximum effect

This chapter is about researching and applying keywords to your inbound marketing efforts. I share some keyword research tools; some of these tools are free to use and some require a paid subscription. Don’t worry if you can’t afford the software or the subscription right now. Instead, you can use the free keyword research tools to formulate a list of target keywords and keyword phrases. Due to the dominance of Google in the United States (it’s two-thirds of all search volume), I use Google as the search engine barometer for this book. Still, you can usually apply your findings to Bing and other search engines to achieve similar results.

After you perform your keyword research, you can apply your findings to improve your content, your onsite SEO, and your paid search campaigns. By applying your keyword rank estimates to your Customer Conversion ...