Welcome to Spiritual Business Spotlight’s Spiritual Business Basics corner. Today, we’re going to talk about the importance of keyword research and SEO for your content and social media marketing strategies.
Why are keywords important?
As you are building your business and blog, you will want to focus on finding the right keywords for your work. Why? Because keywords will be the exact phrases people are entering into Google or their favorite search engine or social media platform to find a healer, a tarot reader, or someone to help them manifest love into their lives.
Keywords are a part of your SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, which is really important. I don’t think that people spend a lot of time thinking about keywords, especially in terms of when they’re working on their social media strategy.
Simply put though, if you are not paying attention to keywords, you might be invisible online. Using keywords is that important.
When you write a blog post, the search engines will “read it”, noting what the title and headers claim the article is about and using different methods, like keyword tracking, to see if the article actually describes what the title says it does.
The search engines also track things like how old your blog is, how many articles you have for specific keywords, how many typos and broken links you have, and even how much social traffic your site gets. It puts all of this information together in order to rank your site. The higher your rank for specific keywords, the closer to the top of the search engine you are.
Social media platforms do this as well. Pinterest and YouTube both have robust search engines that show users pins and videos related to the topics they type in or commonly browse. Instagram has hashtags that work to serve up examples of topics a person is looking for when someone looks for a specific hashtag or topic and Instagram is also working to create a database of articles, with its Guide Feature. Even Amazon runs on a search engine.
When you do thorough keyword and hashtag research, you will get a good idea of topics you can write about regarding your work, what folks are curious about or searching for in reference to those keywords, and also what hashtags, titles, and words to use in your content.
Remember, the keyword research and SEO-driven content you create can include videos, podcast or audio files, social media images, and blog posts. It’s important to note, though, that the search engine reads the words on your site. It cannot read an image, but it can read the text used to describe the image. It cannot read a video or audio file, but it can read the description of the file, the title associated, the blurb or show notes you post about the podcast or interview, and also how popular it is. A.K.A. you can’t pop a video or infographic into a post and just expect it to serve as the content. The search engines cannot read the video format.
Anywho. On to the keyword research part.
Here are some ways you can research keywords and SEO in order to create content for your business.
Brainstorm topics for your content
The first thing you want to do is to create a list of topics you’d like to chat about on your blog, vlog, or podcast. I’ve created a very simple worksheet you can use to get your brain energy flowing.
Content Brainstorming Worksheet
Don’t overthink this stage. Just start listing topics you’d like to talk about.
The reason I purposely simplified this worksheet to lines and not much more was to leave room for your creativity to start flowing. I didn’t want you to feel restricted by rules, categories, themes, or anything of that nature. I wanted to create an environment for you to let things flow.
And remember, you’ll want to make sure that you create valuable content that attracts your audience and leaves them wanting more.
Some ideas for your Content Brainstorming Worksheets:
Your spiritual journey
Your favorite tools
Crystals you like to work with
Your first tarot deck
What you teach about
What a session is like
Pros and Cons of working with something
Complementary practices
Your favorite books
What you are reading right now
How to do/make simple things (spells, lotions, rituals)
What your friends are working on
Angels
Energy healing
Nutrition and spirituality
Holistic Healing
A Tip for Brainstorming and Researching Topics
One thing you want to do is to tie as many topics together as you can as well. That way, you can suggest other blog posts or videos on your channel that will enhance your reader or viewer’s understanding of a topic.
This, too, allows you to plan out a more robust content plan AND gives someone a reason to sign up for your newsletter (something we’ll talk about in a different article). For example, if you are talking about crystals in one blog post or video and then you mention how someone can combine essential oils and crystals, then you create a blogpost about essential oils and a blogpost about combining essential oils and crystals. Each post can reference the other, or you can list the other blogposts in your sidebar or at the bottom of the post.
Researching Topics
The next part of working with keywords is finding out what people are looking for, so that you can then create your content in a way that is going to rank higher on Google, get found, be searchable, and serve as a basis for your social media strategy as well.
Nowadays, keywords are even important on platforms like Instagram—like I mentioned above—because they started an indexing option for your stories and posts. The idea is that you create educational longer-form posts for whatever it is you talk about, whether it’s tarot or numerology, angel card readings or angel channeling, then you can start indexing them on your Instagram page. These look almost like blogposts hosted on Instagram, so the articles come up on Instagram when someone searches for information on a topic that your hashtags indicate you’re covering, instead of sending the person to your bio or website. Your followers can go to your index and find the educational posts that you’ve created on Instagram.
(Sidenote: To be honest, I would NEVER encourage a person to spend a lot of time writing posts for a specific social media platform that were not anchored to a post on their own website or a part of your content creation flow. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first.)
But I digress because I kind of got a little bit ahead of myself, and we did do a digital live a little while ago and I’ll have to find it on here about search engine optimization in my Spiritual Business Basics group on Facebook.
Basically, doing keyword research is pretty easy, but it will take you some time to do.
A few things to keep in mind first, before I go into the how-tos of it.
1) Work with an incognito browser when you are doing keyword research so that your own searches and habits won’t influence the data.
2) Each individual platform or search engine will yield its own results. It is a good idea to gather information for each platform and then see what keywords or phrases appear most often on a variety of platforms so you get the most traction out of your work.
3) What you think people might be looking for is not necessarily what they ARE looking for. Don’t just write off doing keyword research.
4) Don’t make your keywords or the way you talk about your products or services all artsy and unique. I know this might seem like cutting off your creativity or the flow, but if you want to show up in searches, you HAVE to describe your work or the results you get in a way people will be typing into Google, YouTube, Amazon, or Instagram, or Pinterest. Period.
How to research keywords.
This is the simple part, really.
I recommend creating a Google Spreadsheet with some headers like:
Google
Instagram
YouTube
Pinterest
Amazon
1) Open up a browser (incognito is best, as I mentioned above) and start typing. When you type a word, Google will show you a list of its most commonly searched topics related to that word.
2) Scan the list for common search topics that you are interested in talking about.
3) Note them on your spreadsheet
So, for example, you can type “angel” into Google. You’ll see something like this come up:
You can even work with keyword combinations, like archangel, angel therapist, love angels, working with angels, angel healing, etc. to see what people are searching for on Google.
Repeat this research on all of the different platforms and note your findings.
On Instagram, you will want to search for hashtags, keywords, and also look at what the other people in your field are using.
To search on Instagram, tap the little Looking Glass icon at the bottom of your Instagram feed 🔎, or the Compass Icon if you are on your desktop.
Enter your topic and see what comes up, especially noting who comes up in the TOP profiles and what topics come up in TAGS.
Of course, write these things down.
You might also want to check out the TOP profiles to see what kinds of posts they are posting and what hashtags they are using.
YouTube
YouTube is also a search engine with a LOT of great information you can use not only for keyword research, but also to plan your content and social media strategy.
Again, this is as simple as using an incognito browser and typing your keywords or topics you brainstormed into the search bar on YouTube and seeing what comes up.
Note all of the keyword combinations you find that interest you, especially those that are trending and/or that have a lot of views.
Pinterest is a really good platform to research keywords for a couple of different reasons. First, like Google and YouTube, Pinterest is kind of its own search engine as well. Pinterest offers several long tail keywords (groups of keywords commonly used together), and it shows you a variety of combinations of keywords people are searching for.
Again, go to Pinterest, enter your main words into the search bar and note what comes up. Make sure to pay specific attention to longer-form keywords so you can get more specific with the content you create and better match it to searches real people are entering into Pinterest.
Other keyword research tools
After you’ve researched keywords on the social media platforms and search engines, you can use a tool like Ubersuggest to get an idea of how popular the topics you researched are and who else is writing about them. While you may have gotten some preliminary information about the amount of traffic these different keywords are getting on sites like YouTube and Instagram, especially when considering how many times a hashtag has been used or a video has been viewed, you also want to get more specific data about how often people search these terms and what articles are beings shared most often on social media. Ubersuggest also allows you to track your competitors so you can see what they are writing about.
Now, what do you do with all of this keyword research and SEO information?
If you are making a podcast, if you’re making videos, if you’re writing blog posts for your blog, you want to use the keyword research and SEO information you found on the various sites and platforms as a basis for your content creation and marketing strategy.
First and foremost, you want to create content that speaks to the topics represented by the keywords you found. If people are looking for “easy ways to learn tarot”, you want to write an article or create a video about easy ways to learn tarot.
Don’t stop there, though. See if you can use your keyword research and SEO information you’ve gathered to make a series of posts on your blog or website. For example, if you are working with the keywords “easy ways to learn tarot”, you can think about questions like these: Are there topics you can write about that will feed into easy ways to learn tarot? Do you have tips and tricks that will help make learning tarot easy? When you think about keyword research and SEO, think in both very specific and extremely general terms.
Then, when you are working on the written part(s) of your post, you want to make sure to have the keywords as:
Part of your title
In the first sentence of the first paragraph
Sprinkled throughout the text of your write up
In the conclusion of your post
This information is also relevant when creating YouTube videos. You would feed the keyword research and SEO phrases you’ve explored into the title and the blurb area of your video, as well as in the tags you associate with your video.
Bonus points if you can work a couple of complimentary phrases or posts into your blog and sprinkle those keywords into your post as well!
That should give you enough to get started with. If you’d like to learn more about keyword research and SEO and their impact on creating content and a social media marketing strategy using popular keywords, you can check back for more great information as I create new blog posts on the topic.
Also, if you would like to get help with optimizing your marketing results with a clearly focused strategy and plan, schedule a Discovery Call today. I can either help you create and implement a holistic marketing strategy or do it for you.
