Going Wide with Your Keyword Strategy

Is your SEO and content strategy stuck in the doldrums? Have you been gunning for the top industry keyword phrases and are coming up empty?

It could be your keyword strategy is too limited. It might be time to build a new keyword net to capture better results all round.

And some good news is that you can still have your rifle strategy yet support it with more — more keywords, more topics, more content, and more sophisticated techniques with interesting new content angles. The wider the scope, the more reach and more possibilities for SEO.

Yes, going wide or broadening out your content strategy not only adds more value, it can also be used tactically to support your most important keyword rankings.

Customers Need to Find You, Any Way They Can

We should stop limiting our view of where customers come from and how they got to our site. It doesn’t matter how customers find your company and website. All that matters is that relevant consumers see your brand, your message and your value proposition, and see it often.

That visibility alone with additional promotional tactics lets you increase impact on your pool of interested prospects and supporters.

So if you’re cutting back on SEO because of poor performance, it’s likely because you haven’t built a more recession-proof strategy that we might dub “going wide.” I’ve used it many times to help capture a stranglehold on all the best phrases. Have you noticed some sites rank high for a lot of great phrases? With some high-level strategy and funds investment, your company becomes dominant in your sector. I’ll tell you about one client example in the travel sector below.

Your customers search a lot online for many different and related topics, questions, services and products. They use unique words in an attempt to find more relevant results.

Marketers know that real success comes when your marketing content and messages reach them constantly as they work throughout the day. Facebook and Google for instance, maintain hourly contact with B2B and B2C customers.

Widen that Scope!

It’s important to widen the perspective about how you can reach and impact more consumers. The wider your scope of content, keywords and helpfulness, the more likely you are to achieve your niche keyword goals. Anyway that consumers and publishers can find your content and experience it, will lead to more brand mentions and backlinks to your site.

And Google regards similar keyword phrases as relevant and more natural signals for your rankings on the most target “head phrases” which command high PPC price bids. It’s like tributaries flowing into rivers.

Take these overly simplified examples:

Software > Travel Management Software > Tour Management > tour operator software > software for travel businesses
Property management > property management Maui > Maui rentals > Lahaina movers > apartments for rent Hawaii > working in Hawaii > Hawaii homes > hawaii real estate > visit Hawaii
Tours > Best Thailand Tours > private guided tours > best vacations > group tours > tour guides > vacation ideas > best travel destinations > best Thai restaurants > visit Thailand

In each case you’re broadening out to related topics and themes and keywords with much higher volume searches. Since these topics are related, Google considers them relevant and will let pagerank pass through your links.

If you go narrow-focus with few keywords and content, the opportunities to reach customers and influencers shrinks. Suddenly your world is smaller and optimism might erode.

So Good, they Were Acquired by a Major Competitor

With my hotel client, I wanted to leverage the ranking power they had to broaden their keyword range, which I expanded exponentially. Instead of only competing for “hotels”, I engineered new on-site and off-site content to help raise their relevance for towns, cities, airports, and more. The end result was boosting traffic from 1.2 million per year to 2.5 million visits per year and keyword variety in the millions. Amateur SEOs call it long-tail keywords, but there’s more going on here than that.

What Many Venture-Funded Startups Dream About

Here’s a case that most tech startups would love to have. You build such massive presence and traffic, you show up on the radar of market leaders, and they seek to buy you out. That’s a good outcome, but they want you to show innovation, reach, impact, and look as though you might be a challenger. Of course, there is much more to that strategy to get a $50 to $100 million dollar buyout offer. I’ve seen it done though.

After doubling my hotel client’s traffic and massively growing pageviews and visibility on Google, the company was soon bought out by Marriott Hotels. Lots of hotel seekers add airport, affordable, business, downtown, and city names to their keyword searches. They were a business class and upscale travel hotel and a good one at that. So going wide with the hotels keywords created massive exposure on Google search and Google local maps. And when my client showed up in search results so persistently, it created the added dimension of omnipresence. You couldn’t do a Google search without them showing in it.

Building a Broader Base to Reach More

So while going big seems like extra work, it actually powers up your niche keyword strategy. For instance, being “Asia travel” can be more powerful than “private tours in Thailand.” You reach more people for your product and services and more influencers to help you market your specific brand, software product and services. With that power/traffic established, you’re in a better position to rank for “private tours in Thailand.”

And regardless of how someone finds your website, you have a chance to become the most relevant, significant, credible and trustworthy provider to them. They may refer you, share your links, and talk about your company on social media.

It’s competitive out there. You may not be able to rank top 5 in your niche anytime soon, in which case you are left with nothing.

Strategy often involves building strengths at a more basic level, whereby you can later overpower others who have only a niche strategy. It means building more content, on more topics and keyword phrases to reach a wider array of customers. That additional traffic and support is your ace card to beat competitors, and to establish exclusivity with audiences.

Beyond Differentiation to Being the Only Brand they Want

We know how hard it is to differentiate brands and offers, but going wider scope leaves you more flexibility and opportunities to get your brand differentiation across to prospects. More angles in branding, content pieces, and online experiences when crafted strategically gives you maximum opportunities to gain “only one I want” preference.

It’s hard to make consumers see you as the “only one they want” if your content is too narrow. You can access more relevance, more emotions and more reasons to be loyal to your company with a wider approach. So don’t go too nichey with content and SEO because it leaves you out of the narrative that most customers are involved in.

Don’t worry, you’ll get your focused, SEO strategy and rank for your prized keyword phrases, but at a more powerful angle with more massive foundational strength. Always choose advanced SEO and content strategy and keep your mind open to more creative approaches. Today, creativity is being rewarded and you’ll want to master that.

Looking to vastly improve your SEO and Content Performance? Contact Gord at: 416 998 6246.