3.3 : Keyword research for buyer persona
Channel: Joint Masters In Digital & Social Media Marketing
Date: 2018-08-05

http://mastersindigitalmarketing.org

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK
Keyword research is essentially an opportunity for you to identify the keyword phrases – so it could be two words, three words, or a sentence long query – that people would be typing into a search engine to get your products and services. There are a number of different tools that you allow you to do that, but before you get to use those tools, it’s always good to be aware of that whenever you’re deciding on your keywords, there are four aspects that you need to think about:
First of all, is the Relevance of that keyword to your buyer persona…
the Specificity – how many words does it comprise of…
Popularity – how popular is this keyword in search…
and how Competitive – how many others are competing for that term.
 
So in the ideal case, you will find a keyword that is relevant to your buyer persona, that has two, three, or four, or more words in the term, it is very popular, and it’s also least competitive on the market.
Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK
The main keyword terms for us that are important for our business are sector-specific and also location-specific. So if you’re looking for a job in digital marketing, “digital marketing jobs”, “digital marketing recruitment” seem to be two very popular terms for us.
The Candidate Ltd case study emphasises keywords that relate to:

Geographical location

Sector
In terms of the location and the geographical element of this; “digital marketing jobs Manchester”, “digital marketing recruitment Manchester” and “recruitment agencies marketing Manchester” are all variations of terms that are very important for us.
In terms of the keywords that are important for our online persona, we look at the long tail keywords that would attract a wave of traffic in the longer-term in terms of search engines optimization.
Long tail keywords are search terms that comprise 3 or more words. Themore specific the keyword term (the longer the tail) the more likely it is that the buyer persona will become a customer

Example: “Digital marketing skills shortage Manchester”
So we have done research in the past on the skills shortage in the northwest, knowing that this would be a hot topic, you know, in the 18 months or so after we release that research and it is now, and therefore the keyword terms that are being produced like “digital skills shortage Manchester” “developing the northwest of England” in digital marketing – it all produces really strong traffic for us, from the research that we have made live that relates directly to the content on our website.
Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece
For, let’s say, one of our clients are offering gardening products, everything about your garden or for your furniture in-house. So we think that people are looking for specific terms but if you can go to the keyword tool and see the actual phrases, we can see sometimes people are looking with some misspells or syntax or grammar. So we can see how is the actual term and use it not only in the advertising, but you can use it also in our content, not only in our website but in our social media.
The actual search terms used by the buyer persona should be used in the content development – this makes content highly relevant for them
So Google is trying to find relevance of keywords and of course quality of the landing page and the landing page is your Facebook page or your website.
Keyword research starts by documenting staff/social media comments etc., but always ends with actual data from a search engine’s keyword research tool
Sometimes we are asking for colleagues, for friendst or event clients to create a list of keywords, let’s say 10 to 20, how they think that someone is looking for this product. And after that, we are taking these keywords and trying to connect them with initial query. So we are using different ad groups, but at the end, we are always selecting keywords coming from the keyword tool and from monthly search queries.