Whitefish Wednesday – Keyword Targeting
Hi guys, and welcome to another one of our Whitefish Wednesday videos. My name’s Chris Surridge, I’m the director here at Whitefish Marketing. We’re a Kent digital marketing agency who specialize in the accountancy sector predominantly. Today we’re going to be talking about keyword targeting. A lot of people when I speak to them, a lot of accountants mainly, when I speak to them and I asked them, “Where do they want to go ahead and target, what kind of geographic area?” And they always turn around to me and say, “UK wide,” or “I want to go ahead and target UK wide.” And we have to try and reign back in that ambition because it’s very hard to go ahead and target UK wide, especially on small budgets when people don’t realize that they’ll be competing against everyone nationwide. Okay? So we have to make it a little bit more realistic.
How to approach keyword targeting
So whenever we speak to new clients about keyword targeting, we try to show them this kind of diagram, over my shoulder here. And it’s like dropping a stone in a still pond and watching it ripple outwards. We want to focus more on the epicenter to begin with, and then slowly as it ripples outwards, we want to start focusing on the hard respects towards the edges. So here we’ve got these circles. The very first one with the ripples as I’m going to call them, in the epicenter, there is all about your local activity. Okay? So looking at your local keywords, I’m going to make this about Folkestone to begin with, because this is where our offices are and I can talk quite informatively about focusing in surrounding areas. So in this instance here, if I was in accountancy practice here in Folkestone, I want to be focusing all my keywords about accountancy practices or accountants in Folkestone. Folkestone, Folkestone, Folkestone. It’s as simple as that.
Expand outwards from the epicentre
Then after that, we’re going to have a look at the expanded local regions. So this might be your surrounding local area. So once I’ve got Folkestone in the bag, I then might looking at Dover, Hythe, Ashford, and Canterbury and all the surrounding a neighbouring towns around that region. So subsequently, that there will be the expanded local area. Then we move on to things such as longtail keywords. Now your longtail keywords, excuse me. Longtail keywords would be things such as inheritance tax planning services near me. So we’re looking at something a little bit more longtail and we can be a little more focused then on finding particular key phrases that work for you. Once we got hold of the longtail keywords, then we start looking at the county.
Look at county level keywords
We then have a look at Kent as a whole. Again, people type in things such as, “Accountants in Kent,” I’m appearing nowhere. That’s fine, but you haven’t done the first two or first three steps first. So subsequently, let’s have a look at how we can do those first. Then we move into, Accountants of Kent,” or “Accountants in Kent,” and seeing how you can rank within that search phrase. Then lastly, that’s when we start looking at the generics. Now, the generics are the absolute kind of holy grail there, that will be accountants full-stop or inheritance tax planning services or tax investigation services, whatever it might be. You’re looking for something exceptionally generic and that there we’re having no location prefix whatsoever. It’s extremely hard to get hold of those hone generic key phrases. But if you build up your keywords out over a period of time and go through the necessary ripples as it were, eventually can go to the generics and acquire them.
Summary
So if you are an accountancy firm and you are looking to take on the world as it were, do just try and realize that is probably not going to happen. We do need to have a look at things at a local level first, expanded local, then have a look at your longtail keywords, then have a look at the accounting, and then eventually, ultimately we can have look at the generic and nationwide keywords. Okay. Any questions, as always, please drop us a line. Hello@whitefishmarketing.co.uk. We’re more than happy to go ahead and answer any kind of queries that people might have about the stuff that we’re saying here on our Whitefish Wednesday videos. Or if you have any particular questions about digital marketing in its entirety, than hopefully we can answer them. Or maybe we want use your question for the purpose of a new video one week. For now, that’s me signing off. Thank you very much, indeed. And we’ll see for another Whitefish Wednesday video. Thank you.
