The Rewards of Research

The first step in any search campaign is research. Build lists of keywords and phrases to target, bucket them into groups such as audience segments and employ a tool to accurately forecast your results based on budget. Paid search campaigns can be built and launched from this data alone. Once the data is aggregated, content can be analyzed for targeted key phrases. Is your content optimized to capture that traffic? Are there gaps to be filled? Evaluate each page for which bucket it should target and optimize its tags and content accordingly.

It's also important to align your research to your specific business goals. How much of your desired result is new client acquisition and how much is retention? Create buckets and build content pages around these goals as well.

After research, the strategy begins with information architecture optimization. We'll take a look at that in part three.