Are you getting qualified leads for your nutraceutical manufacturing website via the internet? If not, here is what to do.
These days, it is unthinkable not to have a corporate website for your nutraceutical manufacturing company. Some companies have put a lot of thought on their online presence and some companies simply put up a website with scattered information.
In any case, every nutraceutical company out there wants to get more leads and convert those leads into customers- otherwise, no one would go into the trouble of creating a website in the first place, wouldn't they?
So how do you get leads? How do you get people to visit your nutraceuticals manufacturing website, let alone "convince" someone to either pick up the phone and request more info, or fill out a form?
Whilst the entire process from start to finish is rather complicated to be analysed in a single blog post, the single most important aspect to any effort to attract traffic, yet alone qualified traffic, is always achieved by doing one thing and one thing only: doing proper and targeted keyword research.
From that point forward, your only task (that's an understatement!) is to add the keywords you selected in your content strategy, your Adwords campaigns, your downloadable reports and social media updates.
And this is how you bring qualified traffic back to your website.
So, to repeat (because repetition is key):
All activities in attracting and qualifying leads to your nutraceutical manufacturing website, start with keywords research.
Keywords research and implementation is what separates nutraceutical companies that receive a lot of traffic and leads, versus companies that receive very little.
Why do you need it and why is it essential? The simple answer is: to find out what your ideal customer is searching for.
If you don't know what keywords your customers type on Google and other search engines, how will you be able to optimise your website or know what content to write that attracts your ideal customers?
In this guide I will show you:
- How to properly research your keywords for your nutraceutical manufacturing website.
- How to learn more about what keywords your competition is using
- How to understand, in simple terms, which keywords on your list have the highest search volume.
- Shortcuts, tools and other tricks to rank higher in 30 days or less.
First, you need to understand that you need tools. Just like an electrician, a plumber or a builder needs tools, so does the aspiring digital marketer - you.
There is a variety of very sophisticated keyword suggestion tools for which you can pay for access, but some of them have free trials and others are completely free to use.
Obviously there are also free tools to use, which lack the sophistication, but they can help you enough to start acquiring customers - once you do that you can move to premium tools.
What I propose is to combine a variety of free tools to create a keyword list that’ll bring you results.
Are you ready to start of exploring these free keyword tools to learn more about what your ideal customers search?
1. Lets start with keyword research
First of all, preparation. For this you will need a spreadsheet. Go to your favorite spreadsheet software or create on in Google Sheets and create a new spreadsheet. This will be useful to fill in all those keywords you are going to find, including:
- The volume of searches per month
- Competitors
- Cost per click
Phase 1: Discover Keywords
When you want people to find your nutraceutical manufacturing website, what do you expect them to type in the search bar of their browser?
This is one of the most difficult part - assuming what your customers type. Most of your prospects start by typing very broad keywords like vitamins or nutraceutical manufacturing.
I do not advise against that. In fact, it is actually a good place to start thinking as your customer. The various keywords suggestion tools will provide you with suggestions anyway.
Start with brainstorming and answer the following:
- What does your nutraceutical business do?
- Do you manufacture vitamins, health supplements or anything else and in what forms?
- Do you private label for others?
- Do you specialise in certain products, i.e. Vitamin B or something else?
- Do you offer the possibility to order via your nutraceutical website, or via email/fax/telephone only?
- Who are your ideal clients?
- Who are your best clients now?
- How prospects find you now?
After answering and writing down all or most of the above, armed with this info yo ucan start asking the tools to give you answers.
Tool 1: Google Autosuggest
One of the most active tools out there is owned by Google itself, and is none other than Google Autosuggest. To see it in action, open Chrome and type something within the search box. Watch the suggestions:
Notice that in the above example, I haven't even typed the word "nutraceutical" correctly. Yet Google understood what I wanted and returned the right results.
Obviously, this is not a scalable solution. You can't gather massive keyword lists this way, as Google simply allows you to select one of the keywords so as to bring back the page results. However, a tool called Soovle, which we analyse further below, can give you a larger suggestion set, not only from Google but from Yahoo, Bing, Amazon and more.
However, this is also a very important step in this phase: you can now see which of your competitors, in this case nutraceutical manufacturers, rank in the first page.
As of 5/11/2018, the results for typing "nutraceutical manufacturers" are:
Now, lets analyse what we found up to now.
You will notice that at the top of the page, there are advertisers that compete on the first two positions. These get roughly 70% of all traffic for the given keyword.
Then, we have the organic results. The businesses, blogs or industry news sites, like Nutraceuticals World that do not advertise, but rest assured they have invested a hefty amount of resources to writing content with keywords.
At the end of the search results, there are more ads who compete for the same keyword and are shown at the bottom of the results due to to budget or relativity issues (we will discuss more about relativity issues in another blog post).
Finally, a very interesting finding which you may have never noticed: Related terms for the given keyword. This is a wealth of information, as you can simply copy all these and place them into a spreadsheet for further analysis.
From this tool, you should then start having an understanding of search results, related searches, ads and organic results. It is now time to move to the next step in this phase.
Tool 2: Soovle
Remember we talked about Soovle previously? Well, I bet that Google Autosuggest results are not enough, so that's why Soovle exists.
Soovle operates based on the search engine you select. Select a search engine, and type your keyword. As you type, it starts to display numerous autosuggestions, taken directly from your preferred search engine.
For example, when I type "nutraceuticals" it will give me a great amount of autosuggestions. If I click on any of these, it will take me to the corresponding search results, based on that keyword.
See below:
Click on as many relevant links you have, and note down the search term on your excel sheet. As soon as you do that, it is now time to move to more advanced free tools.
Tool 3: Google AdWords Keyword Tool
The next free tool is the the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Yes, its part of Google Adwords, but you are not forced to create ads using it. All you have to do is open an account on Google Adwords which is free, and then use the tool without creating any ads.
Lets see how searching for "nutraceutical business" pans out.
When you first log in, you go to Tools>Keyword Planner.
From there you will be presented in the following screen:
If you are looking for new keywords, you will need to click on "Find New Keywords" box. If you have gathered some keywords from Soovle and you need to know how many people are looking for them, then you need to click on "Get search volume and forecasts" box.
In our case, we are not aware of the keywords our audience is looking for so we will be clicking in the "Find new keywords" box.
Upon clicking, we can add words, phrases, or a competitor's website. That's really powerful, plugging in a nutraceutical competitor business and see for what keywords they rank for - if they have done their research. We will see an example shortly.
So, now its the time to add the keywords you noted down.
For now, lets start with the keyword "nutraceutical business" and see what we get.
Hmm, not much. Please note the following: I have my location set as the UK. I don't get a lot of results from that search, as I just asked Google that I need to search for nutraceutical businesses in the UK, and there aren't many that rank or search for these keywords. Only 4 keywords, and no other data.
If I change it to search in the USA, though, and change the search to include Google & Search Partners as well, I get more information:
Obviously though, I get very few searches for the word "nutraceutical business" so I will change that to something else. If you are reading this post I guess that you are a nutraceutical manufacturing company , so lets change to what might interest you more:
Now we are talking: 33 keyword ideas.
Lets search for private label nutraceuticals:
Ok, only 6. But notice a pattern? The terms "private label nutraceuticals" and "nutraceutical manufacturer" have a huge volume (meaning that they are searched) from 100 to 1,000 times per month.
That means that potentially, and in an ideal world, 100 - 1000 potential customers are looking to find how to private label nutraceuticals and how to find a nutraceutical manufacturer.
Obviously, a user may search the same term multiple times in a given month, so this is also accounted for.
Remember we talked about plugging in in your competitor? Lets try that with a random website. I personally like NutraScience Labs' website as they have done an excellent work on it, so I am using them as an example:
Guess what: they use around 1298 keywords on their site.
No wonder why, as they also pay for Google Ads, so I am guessing they are not wasting their marketing dollars in doing untargeted marketing.
Moving on, what you need to do now, is select which keywords you think customers might be looking for, and have a sizeable search volume with medium to low competition - ideally.
Sizeable volume IS NOT 10-100 searches per month. It is more that 250 searches per month, and if the competition is high, or you are addressing to a global audience, you will have a hard time ranking for this keyword.
Lets say you selected the keywords you want, and now it is time to:
- Add them to a Google Adwords plan (which will be transformed later on to a campaign), or,
- Download them to an excel sheet.
Recent Google Adwords changes (2017-2018) have allowed marketers to have an estimate beforehand on how their ads are going to perform. I personally select adding my keywords to a plan and then what I do is click on the "Plan Overview" to the right, which it immediately shows me:
- How many clicks will I be getting for any given budget I type
- How much it will be costing me on a per click basis (CPC)
It also shows me the click-through rate, the devices that are likely to be shown/clicked, and the locations.
How awesome is that?
Search for as many keywords you want. Download them on your excel sheet and when you are done, move to the next tool below.
Tool 4: Google Correlate
Google Correlate is a virtually unknown tool to the many. This tool exists in order to help marketers check which of their keywords are search in groups - for example, if I type "nutraceutical manufacturing website" is there anything else that people search with that term?
If yes, then this tool helps you create the so-called long tail keywords, which you need more than the short, broader terms.
Why is that? Because people start searching generally i.e. "nutraceutical companies", then based on the results they get, they understand that their search is too broad and try to change it to have more relevant outcomes.
The very next keyword that your prospects many be looking for after they started with a braod term, would probably be "nutraceutical manufacturing companies", and then they will probably narrow it down to "private label nutraceutical manufacturing companies", or "private label nutraceutical manufacturing companies with small MOQ".
And this last phrase, dear reader, is a long tail keyword .
So, lets see how this works:
I typed "healthcare marketing" and I got a list of keywords that people often search together. This also allows me to select country, compare different US states, and also usage statistics.
Because I have selected "quality assurance" as a term, it opens a graph at the bottom which shows me how often- in different times- healthcare marketing has been used with quality assurance. An example of a combined search would be "healthmarketing quality assurance".
In this graph, I see that the graph is going downwards so I wouldn't really use it. No one wants a keyword that lacks traffic or is loosing traffic for years.
Once you have a pretty good idea of what combined keywords your prospects may be using, you add them to your spreadsheet. As soon as you are satisfied, its time to move to the next tool in our arsenal.
Tool 4: Ubersuggest
This is really my favorite free tool of all.
Apart of a sleek design, ease of use, Ubersuggest offers a vast amount of data that Google Adwords may not be showing you, for a variety of reasons.
This is where Ubersuggest comes in. Open Ubersuggest and type your keyword. It will create/pull a list of keywords that may exceed your expectations.
What I love about this tool is that it gives me how much of a percentage will I be able to rank this keyword for.
It also provides me with similar ideas, difficulty, as well as search results. It really is, among the free tools out there, my favorite.
Ok, so we got so far. By now you should be having a good idea of what keywords are out there, what keywords to use for your nutraceutical manufacturing or retailing business and added them on a list to be used.
Phase 2 - Analysis and keyword use
This is the most difficult part of your journey to bring in more qualified customers to your nutraceutical manufacturing website. Now that you have an estimate of what keywords your customers use to find information, you need to analyse them and find what they actually see when they type a specific keyword from your list.
Unfortunately, this part is entirely done via paid tools. There are simply no free tools to do your research, other than putting each keyword on the Google Search and see what comes up.
However, most of these tools come either with free use with limited results, or with a free trial, usually 14-30 days.
If you have done your homework and added all keywords in a spreadsheet, then you are ready to sign up to one of these tools and get results.
Paid Analysis Tool 1: Serpstat
Serpstat is a relative new tool with multiple features that makes even the best tools look like a midget in front of them.
Its creators are calling it the Growth Marketing Tool, and they are quite right.
It gives you limited capabilities for the free version, however, you can get valuable data even then.
For example, I typed "health marketing", which is pretty generic and had a multitude of results like:
- How difficult is it to rank for this keyword
- What is the percentage of competition for this keyword
- How much would it cost you if you were to run paid ads
- Who is ranking at the top 10 results
- A rich summary of the top domains that rank for this keyword (the title and description)
I can also see who is using paid ads from the right menu, what content is there for healthcare marketing and how many backlinks are there for this keyword as well.
Add your keywords one by one to SerpStat and note what results you are getting. Note down on your excel sheet the analysis of each keyword. In your mind, start visualising articles, titles and social media posts, even email outreach with these keywords.
Once you are ready, move on to the next tool.
Paid Analysis Tool 2: BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo, used on top of Serpstat, is one of the all time favorites of mine. BuzzSumo is a content search tool, and we use it extensively to find content around a keyword. We then analyse this content to identify links, other keywords and build a content silo.
With BuzzSumo, all you have to do is type a keyword, and then see who is writing what around that keyword. Blog posts, articles, news, everything.
So for example, lets type "health marketing".
The results we get are articles that are highly relevant to this keyword, and you can simply click on it and visit the article to read it.
What is simply amazing is that you can see the number of shares according to mediums, like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Reddit, as well as how many links this article has.
Once you get a good sense of what has been written or mentioned for the keywords you selected, it is time to start using all those keywords you found to get results to your website.
2. How to use keywords to get more qualified leads to your nutraceutical manufacturing website
Ok, now that you have probably finalised keywords research, analysed trending content, and you have a list of ready to use keywords, how will you be able to use them to bring qualified leads to your nutraceutical manufacturing website?
Well, its simple (but not that simple).
You produce content in your website in a form of
- Blog posts
- Product descriptions
- About us page
- Company information
- Downloadable brochures (pdfs, ebooks, white papers, lists, ingredients, product specifications)
Even the contact us page should have some keywords that you have selected.
You also use these keywords on your LinkedIn profiles, your LinkedIn company page, as well as on Twitter and Facebook.
You put these keywords inside newsletters you send out.
You created Google Display, Google Search and Bing Ads with these keywords.
Everything you write from now on,your entire ecosystem that is publicly available and serves as educational, informational and entertaining content, should contain one or more keywords.
If you paid attention to the above, if you took some time to figure out, research and analyze keywords, content and who is currently using them and what they write, you should be able to produce equally or better content and distribute it for free on your nutraceutical manufacturing website, your social media and anything that reaches your ideal clients.
In our next blog post will analyse how, using the keywords we found useful for our agency, Centis Digital, helped us create press releases and how we approached journalists and thought leaders to create awareness about our digital marketing services in the nutraceutical industry.