One of the most beneficial things you can do for your business is know how to efficiently use keywords in your marketing materials. Correct keyword usage will help to boost your search results, driving the most effective traffic to your online presence. This is crucial for growth and brand awareness, as these days your online reputation is everything.

However, you can’t just type in a few words to your website or Facebook page and assume that that’s enough. There are specific strategies and skills you need to know in order to most effectively use keyword marketing. It may be worth it to hire a marketing content person for your team whose job is solely to manage this aspect.

If a marketer isn’t in your budget, there are still some things you can do for yourself. Knowing the basics and implementing them will create groundwork that you can build upon in your digital and offline marketing efforts. Here are a few strategies to get started:

Find the Best Keywords for Your Business

First and foremost, you will need to find the most effective keywords for both your business and your audience. This will require in-depth analysis and research, generally with your own series of A/B tests. You may also want to track what keywords your competitors are using.

One of the considerations you should make when deciding keywords is user intent. This means knowing what your audience is looking for when they’re looking for your business — why are they seeking you out and what do they hope to gain from your interaction? Understanding how people use search terms will help you best understand how to implement different keywords into your online presence.

Once you’ve determined the list of keywords you feel will most match how your users are searching for services, you can cross-check them against how frequently those specific terms are used. There are several tools you can use to research this, like SEMRush, or Jaaxy. This cross-reference strategy will help you to choose keywords that are related to your business, the most useful for your audience, and the most frequently used, giving the best competitive edge in choosing the keywords you’ll implement across your marketing efforts.

Use Your Keywords Across Copy

The next thing you’ll need to do once you’ve secured your keywords is use them consistently across every type of copy in your business. You may immediately think of headers on your website or social media presences—  and you’re not wrong. However there are so many other copy considerations to make in regard to keyword usage.

For example, you’ll want to make sure that you have a robust content library on your website. Not only will a blog help to establish you as a trusted authority with your audience, but having regular, well-written content that smartly utilizes keywords will help you to better appear in search results for those terms. Once your users find you through a keyword search, they’ll continue to come back to you for more and more information — and hopefully for your services.

You also absolutely have to ensure you use keywords in your titles. Not only will this tell your audience what to expect from the page, but the words used within the title of a page are what creates the title that shows on the search engine results page. This means that the title of your page will be the very first thing a person sees before they’ve even clicked the link on the first page of Google search results

Use Your Keywords Offline as Well

Finally, you have to make sure that you not only write about your company using your chosen keywords at all times, but you have to speak about it with those same phrases as well. Of course, in day-to-day conversation you don’t have to sound like a walking search engine — that would be ridiculous and disingenuous. However, there are other places where you’ll be speaking about your company where you should be using those terms.

For example, in any television or radio ad spots that you air, you should be using the best keywords possible. This is because people will search those key terms from your commercials to find your company online. It’s entirely possible they won’t remember the name of your automotive detailing company, so they may search what they remember from the commercial: “funny car cleaning ad with chicken mascot.”

In this example, you would have made sure to include the key terms “car” and “cleaning” within your commercial script so that viewers would associate your business with those terms. They may also search for “auto detailing,” see your company name pop up on the search page, and then say to themselves, “Oh yeah, I remember this company from their ad.” Then they’ll know who you are and what you do, and they’ll go to your page for the services you offer.

Avery T. Phillips is a freelance human being with too much to say. She loves nature and examining human interactions with the world. Make a comment below or reach out to her on Twitter @a_taylorian with any questions or suggestions.