TL;DR

We provide a holistic, modern approach to keyword research, addressing issues like poor traffic quality and difficulty ranking as well as tackling issues that result in search engines and AI platforms failing to understand your business.

This goes beyond just looking for high-volume trophy keywords, focusing on building relevance, domain expertise, and topical authority. Our keyword research service aims to enhance your discoverability and readability for humans, search engines, and AI platforms alike.

Pain points

If you’re struggling with any of the following, our keyword research service may help:

• Poor quality/irrelevant traffic
• Difficulty ranking for industry terms
• Search engines/AI not understanding what you do

What we mean by keyword research

We say this a lot on our service pages (and in real life, to be honest), but things were a lot simpler once upon a time. While we were never ‘keyword density’ people, but there was a relatively easy path between what a brand did and what it needed to rank for – we targeted lower volume, long tail terms, identified trophy terms in the ‘fat head’ and we worked on content and links to push businesses up to the top of those ten blue links.

With the number and variety of rich results that now show on the average SERP, and Google consistently pushing AI Overviews ahead of organic content, keyword research is about more than just picking targets that will hopefully boost revenue – like everything in modern search, it’s about building relevance and domain expertise. That means there are going to be keywords you may not even know are important that could play a role not just in how people find your site, but also in how search engines and AI platforms understand your business.

When we talk about keyword research (and longtail keyword research) we’re talking about a more holistic approach – we’re not just looking to discover keywords that will directly drive revenue (though that’s the aim in the long run), we’re also looking for keyword targets that will help to build topical authority, enhance topic relevance and help your brand improve its readability as well as discoverability by humans, search engines and AI platforms alike.

MMC Digital’s keyword research service

As mentioned above, this isn’t just about bringing you a list of fat head trophy keywords with 10k+ search volume on Ahrefs or Semrush (or similar, but just to name-drop some faves). This is about identifying the top of the tree results that will build topical relevance and improve your overall keyword coverage across your domain of expertise. Whether you’re a professional service business or an ecommerce brand, there are levels of expertise you need to communicate in order to demonstrate your worthiness as a source. 

Our keyword research service is about working out the top level terms that you’re not covering – think of it as a kind of keyword gap analysis, only instead of just looking to your competitors, we’re looking at your vertical in a more holistic manner, so see where and how you can better show your domain knowledge and build authority with your content.

Audit

Even brands in direct competition are never exactly alike, so we always try to begin every keyword project with an audit – not every brand in a vertical speaks the same, and neither do their customers. The customers of a highstreet chain and bespoke custom jeweller, for example, will search differently even if they’re looking for the exact same thing. The way we need to demonstrate your authority to search engines is, and will likely continue, changing – and it’s important to develop an ontological understanding of your brand in relation to your vertical.

We aim to get to know you, your business, and audit performance against your aims to understand and establish what exact niche you’re looking to occupy, and your overall positioning in order to make sure that we’re able to properly approach the research aspect of the project and deliver learnings that will help you move the needle.

Research

Once we’ve grasped your market position and benchmarked current performance, we can move on to the keyword research – looking to identify terms, topics and themes that will help contribute to establishing your business as an expert and trustworthy voice in your niche.

While this is predominately a technical exercise to help you develop relevance and authority, the end result is designed to provide you with an understanding of the content you can target to develop your brand’s ontological importance, help you grow your traffic, but – more importantly – to win more relevant traffic. 

With Google seemingly intent on reducing the amount of traffic a brand can expect from search, we need to make sure we’re a discoverable and trusted source across the full spectrum of relevant topics. We’ll help you understand how, and make sure that you’re set up for success in both the present and future of search.

What can our keyword research service do for your business?

As we’ve mentioned throughout, this is not your grandfather’s keyword research service – this is about building a thorough topic map that allows you to demonstrate your subject matter expertise. While we’ll, of course, identify potential drivers of visibility and revenue (all of this is about revenue, at the end of the day), what we’re looking to do is help you establish yourself as an important and trustworthy source in your chosen vertical – and that’s necessary whether you’re offering professional services, ecommerce purchases, earning charitable donations or anything in between.

• Our keyword service provides you with a research document that prepares you to:
• Future proof your search strategy
• Craft an expert entity for your brand from your online presence
• Improve visibility and discoverability
• Become a trusted source for humans and AI platforms