Most people understand the importance of creating an effective content marketing campaign. However, it’s much more difficult to create a campaign that is destined for success. In fact, most content creation strategies are doomed to fail before they even get off the ground.

Here are a few of the most common issues that cripple content marketing campaigns and what you can do to avoid these mistakes:

Not Establishing Your Parameters Before Starting Your Campaign.

When This Happens: In the early stages of a campaign, usually when a company decides that it needs to do content marketing in the first place.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get excited about starting a content marketing campaign. It’s often so easy to get excited that you don’t think about why you are doing a campaign, who your target audience is or what your objectives should be.

How to Avoid It: Think about who the ideal person to read your content is, then write content that you believe will directly impact this person’s life.

Not Creating Content on a Regular Basis.

When This Happens: A few months into a campaign, as soon as the “newness” of launching a creative campaign wears off.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to devote a lot of energy into a content creation campaign at the beginning. But it’s also easy to give up on a campaign before it really gets off the ground.

How to Avoid It: You need to understand that Google rewards content only if it is done on a consistent basis. Set a schedule to post several times a week at the start of your campaign and stick to it.

Keywords Matter.

When This Happens: Poor keyword strategies often doom content creation campaigns from the beginning.

Why This Happens: It’s common to take the wrong approach to keywords, such as keyword stuffing or using keywords that are too broad.

How to Avoid It: Start by doing some effective keyword research to make sure you are targeting the right phrases that will connect with your target customers.

Failing to Create Internal Links.

When This Happens: At the start of a campaign before you even write your first piece of content.

Why This Happens: Many people simply don’t understand the importance of internal links and how much of a role it can have in helping the overall SEO on their site.

How to Avoid It: Content and links are two things that should work together and not independently of each other. Think about ways that you can internally link to multiple pages on your website with each piece of content.

Failing to Diversify Your Content.

When This Happens: Whenever a marketer fails to realize that everything they publish can potentially be content marketing material.

Why This Happens: It’s easy to get locked in on a certain type of content (such as blog posts) and continue to produce it again and again.

How to Avoid It: Diversify your content. eVisible can help you to create high quality blog posts for your site. We can also provide you with the right mixture of premium content and link creation.

Not Integrating Images Into Your Content.

When This Happens: Throughout the entirety of a content creation campaign.

Why This Happens: Too many people associate “content” with “words” and don’t understand the potential value of integrating images into your articles, blog posts and onsite content.

How to Avoid It: Images make stories more interesting and help to improve SEO results. Use them every time you create content.

Not Using Social Media to Promote Your Content.

When This Happens: After the first blog post is a written and a content marketer simply expects that people will magically find it and make it viral.

Why This Happens: It’s a fundamentally lack of understanding about how content gets shared. You need to promote your content in order for people to find it.

How to Avoid It: Use popular social media sites to share the content you create. Come up with ideas such as mailing lists or forum postings to expand your reach.

Google’s recent move to restrict access to keyword information was blow to many online advertisers and marketers. For many people, Google’s keyword suggestion tool was the main way that they researched potential keywords to use in SEO and PPC campaigns. But savvy advertising and marketing experts were already using other keyword tools to augment their research. Here are 11 tools to consider when looking for a keyword suggestion tool.

Wikipedia: Going to Wikipedia pages related to topics that are related to your business is already a great way to discover keyword phrases. When you use the SEOQuake Toolbar while on Wikipedia, you can quickly see the words and phrases most commonly used on these pages.

Amazon.com: Amazon has provided users with free access to a wonderful SEO resource: books related to their subject. Search for books and look for “Look Inside” books with free previews. Many keywords can be found in the chapter or section titles. Another way to use Amazon for SEO purposes is to just start a search on products related to your category. Amazon’s Auto Correct feature will suggest lots of related phrases and versions of your keyword.

Press Release Sites: Visit press release distribution sites like PR.com or Yahoo News to get a sense of what companies in your space are saying about themselves. Browse through industry categories and search press releases to find frequently used words and phrases by your competitors.

Soovle and Ubersuggest: Soovle will help you by automatically creating lists of keyword suggestions across multiple search engines (such as Bing, Amazon, Yahoo and YouTube). Ubersuggest takes a longtail approach by getting keywords from regular searches along with specific searches like News, Shopping or Videos.

eVisible’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: Our own free tool gives you a large list of potential keywords based on words or phrases that you provide. It’s fast, easy to use and gives you plenty of great keywords to use. You can find the Keyword Suggestion Tool at https://www.evisible.co/tools/keyword-suggestion/.

Followerwonk: Using Followerwonk to determine the influential social media experts in your space gives you several avenues of keyword research. You can scrape these people’s Tweets using a service like AllMyTweets and then feed the content into a word cloud generator like Wordle to find frequently-mentioned terms. You can also export title tags using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider into Wordle.

Prismatic: When you are searching for SEO keywords specifically for social media, Prismatic is a great tool. You can follow topics by category and browse social media updates to find frequently-used keywords.

Google Correlate: Google hasn’t completely dried up as a source of keyword research. You can use its Google Correlate product to search for the most frequently searched for terms within a given time frame. You can compare search rates on a weekly or monthly basis or across different time frames to see when the right time to use a keyword might be.

By now, you probably know about the some of the basic tools for SEO keyword research before launching an online campaign. Everyone understands the tools that are available through Google’s Keyword tool and performing various online searches. But if you want to take your campaign to the next level, you need to go beyond the basics and use a wide range of sources for your research.

One great way to do this is with eVisible’s free Keyword Suggestion Tool, which provides you with effective and targeted keywords to meet your needs. Along with this, there are other outlets that will provide you with useful information and potential keywords for your SEO campaign. Here are four sources to consider:

Popular Posts of the Year: One way to understand what keywords people are searching for is to see which blog posts are generating interest within your niche. One way to do this is by performing a Google search that looks something like this:

[your field]+most popular posts of 2012+traffic

So, if you an investigative firm, you might perform a Google search like this:

“Investigative Law” “most popular posts of 2012” traffic

The results might take you to posts like this one from the Diligentia Group highlighting their 10 most popular posts out of the more than 50 they made in 2012. Reviewing these posts will give you a sense of which keywords they highlighted and what readers were searching for when they arrived.

Google Keyword Tool Searches By Year: You can also use chronology to narrow your searches when using the Google Keyword tool. When reviewing your analytics data with Google Keyword, do a search for “2012.” This will tell you the phrases and keywords that were generating interest in the previous year and which ones will likely to become popular soon.

Wikipedia: Nothing is more frustrating than spending money on a keyword campaign only to see a Wikipedia link come up first on results. It can be hard to move a Wikipedia site some a top ranking. You can use this tool (https://stats.grok.se/) to review the traffic volume of any Wikipedia site for the last 90 days to see if a page associated with any keyword term is going to be an obstacle to your success.

Government Websites: As Search Engine Land accurately points out, government sites are potential goldmines for keyword information. In many cases, you can see the most popular pages, referring sites and keywords used for many government sites that could relate to your niche. Reviewing this data will give you a better sense of popular keywords and potential link partners.

You might think that keywords and content are two entirely separate concepts. Think again – your keywords and the content that you create using these keywords doesn’t operate independently. They work together to form one cohesive part of your overall search engine optimization plan. If you are providing content writing services for a client or doing your own writing, you need to consider how your keywords and content will work with each other throughout your campaign.

When you are researching your keywords, consider how they will fit into your content. Some keywords phrases, for example, might not naturally flow when you try to use them in website copy, blogs or press releases. Having to fit poorly-constructed keywords into content is something that even professional providers of SEO copywriting services struggle with. Think about the types of content that you’ll be writing as part of your SEO campaign and project how certain keyword phrases can be integrated. If you see any phrases that might be difficult to use naturally, you might want to skip them.

Expanding your focus during keyword research to include a mixture of broad and narrow search terms is one way to make life easier for you or your provider of website content writing services. It gives you the ability to write content that speaks to broad concepts within your industry along with being able to focus on specific products or brands that are relevant.

Along with assisting in article writing services, it’s also smart from an SEO standpoint to include a mixture of broad and narrow search terms. Broad search terms often have the most competition, as other businesses want to rank highly for them as well. Including narrower search terms in your keywords gives you the best chance to improve your rankings quickly. In addition, people who search for narrow keywords often have specific products in mind and might be ready to make a purchasing decision instead of simply visiting a website to “browse.”

You’ll also want to consider how many keywords you choose to target with your initial SEO campaign. More keywords mean you’ll need to create more content in order to properly boost the rankings for these terms. Viral marketing services can help you to produce a high volume of content that can be quickly pushed through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites, but focusing on the most important keywords will allow you to focus your content on the terms that are most important for your business.

Contact eVisible today to learn more about the relationship between content and keywords. Our professional SEO services specialists can discuss the concepts of SEO with you and also your unique online marketing needs.

When it comes to SEO campaigns, using the right keywords is critical to success. You can corner the market on keywords that are related to your industry, but if these keywords don’t correlate to clients and customers, what good does this do? Keywords serve as invitations for customers to check out your site. When someone does a search on a keyword or phrase and your site ranks highly in the results, you’ve effectively brought them to the front door of your virtual business. A smart keyword strategy not only gets customers to your virtual store but makes sure they are looking to spend money and not just there to window shop.

Knowing your market and your place within the market is critical to researching your keywords. Less competitive keywords and phrases might generate less traffic but there’s also a greater chance that you’ll rank highly for them if you target them with an SEO campaign. If you are in a niche market, you can find keywords that will specifically target people looking for exactly what you’re providing. This can get your ideal customer to your website quickly while providing immediate returns on your SEO campaign. If you are an established company looking at long-term gains, you might want to focus on a few keywords that are more competitive. You’ll know your market and your position better than anyone else and will want to adjust your SEO campaign accordingly.

Before starting any keyword search, there are a few things that you’ll want to consider:

• If you are using Google AdWords Keywords Suggestion Tool, make sure you are doing an Exact Search instead of a Broad Search. This is something that you can toggle between by clicking a button before you perform a search. A Broad Search will include phrases that include your keywords in any order or even parts of your keyword phrase. It also includes plural or singular forms, stemmed forms and synonyms. An exact search only returns the phrase exactly as you entered it. You can search for both if you want to expand your search but this can create confusion in your research.
• Think about all of the different ways that people might search for your products. Instead of just focusing on your category of business, do searches for specific product models or sub-categories of services you provide. Search for variations with part numbers or popular abbreviations of products.
• More than anything else, ask yourself what customers are searching for and build your keyword list accordingly.

Before you start doing your research on your keywords, it’s important to have a game plan in place. Instead of just grouping words together that “seem” the same, group them into categories. If you sell golf clubs, one category could be for name brands of golf clubs. Another could be for types of clubs (such as drivers, irons, wedges or putters). Other categories could describe what people are searching for with new versus used equipment. This lets you select keywords that target the right audience and potential reach as many different customers as possible.

Ultimately, you want to get the highest Return on Investment for your SEO campaign. eVisible understand this, which is why we’ve created a powerful Keyword Research and Suggestion tool and made it available for free on our website. All you need to do is enter in a keyword, phrase or a bit of marketing copy and it instantly gives you a list of related keywords. It’s a great way to start your keyword research and narrow down (or expand) your choices. You might want to focus on areas of your business that are currently underperforming by targeting related keywords. Or you might notice keywords and phrases with a limited amount of competition that you can rank highly for more quickly. Having a smart game plan and doing the research the right way will set you on the path to smart and focused keyword-based SEO campaign.