Last semester I took Business Ethics, and this class required me to write a paper on an ethical question and find resources to support whether it is ethical or not. Now you may be wondering why I am telling you this; well, a key element in the research process was for me to use keywords to find articles to use. This was something that was completely new to me, and I had to figure it out. Looking back, I do feel as though I did not use keyword research to the best of my ability, which ended up limiting the number of articles I could find. I struggled to know specifically what words to use and found myself sticking to the same words, which (surprisingly) showed me the same articles every time. It made my research process take longer than it probably could have. I do want to improve in keyword research, and I’ll take any advice you have!
I have done a little research on keywords and found a helpful article by HubSpot. They enlightened me on a few different benefits of keyword research, most of which we discussed in class. Some of the benefits included marketing trend insight, traffic growth, and customer acquisition. All of these we have discussed briefly in class but prove to be beneficial when creating your website! One aspect in the article I found interesting was the topic of keywords vs. topics. The article talked about how topics are an operative term. You can use keywords that a large population uses to search, and through that, you can organize your content into topics (or buckets) to help create your content. The topics work to influence which keywords you look to use and focus on. I really liked how they used the image of sorting the content into buckets. It really emphasizes the importance of breaking down your content and focusing on what the different categories are and how to work with them. Doing this could even expose a topic that you had not fully considered.
The article also shared a simple yet effective visual that is a great reminder of the function of keywords! (The picture is below.) I found this article super helpful and will possibly refer back to it as I learn more about keyword research!
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht
2 Responses
Thank you for sharing this helpful information on keyword research and topics! The concept of keywords has always been a bit confusing to me.
I think the idea of using “topics” as buckets is a brilliant takeaway from that HubSpot article. It really simplifies the process by organizing your keywords into categories that make sense, and it helps you see the bigger picture of your content strategy. It’s definitely something I want to try out too—it could open up so many more avenues for research and make the whole process more efficient.