My clients always ask me "How do you go about finding keywords and creating an effective keywords strategy?"

With the constant changes of Google's algorithm and most importantly consumer behaviour, companies struggle to define the right keywords. That struggle, though, comes from the lack of process or a way to go about coming up with the keywords. 

Today, I want to solve that challenge for you and offer you a very simple, but super effective guide to doing keywords research and defining your keywords strategy. 

But before I go on into the actual steps I want to point one significant shift that we have been seeing recently – the growing importance of topics and catering for user needs.

Today, Google wants to solve for user intent. With the huge amount of data, it now understands natural language patterns and tries to identify meaning around the context of a search. It wants to offer solutions that are meaningful and relevant, not so much purely based on the exact words a user has put in the search box. This is called semantic search and it should drive your keywords strategy. So bear this in mind as we go ahead.

How to Do Keywords Research and Create Your Keywords Strategy:

With the proliferation of digital media, influencer marketing is becoming more and more important for inbound marketing to generate traffic and help drive leads, but it’s now also more challenging to do than ever before.  

We’ve spoken a little bit about influencer marketing when discussing it as part of the PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned media) model that guides modern PR and even more so inbound PR that is strongly orientated towards digital and inbound.

Basically, influencer marketing is getting others to tell your story, and not just any others, but people who have somewhat of a celebrity status within their area of expertise and have a fairly big audience due to their popularity and reputation. When we say celebrity, that doesn’t necessary mean an actress or a singer. It could, for example, be a fitness blogger with a huge Instagram following.

The problem with influencer marketing, though, is that it’s hard, you cannot control the results, and with the rise of other influencers such as YouTubers or Instagrammers and no longer just journalists or bloggers, the sheer of influencers has made it even more complicated to pick the right ones. 

And there’s, of course, the notion of not knowing how to approach those influencers as it is still rather new and very different than traditional media relations. Influencer relations is the Wild West now.

It's been a while since we've had an interview for my blog series "Why Work in PR?" I hadn't forgotten about it but I didn't have the right person to go next yet. Now I do. 

Today, Farzana Baduel shares her PR experiences and some fantastic advice for students and young professionals.

Farzana and I 'met' on Twitter a few months ago, I was impressed by her profile, then I 'stalked' her on LinkedIn and was amazed by her achievements, building up her own very successful global PR agency. A true career that can you inspire you too and so I offered to interview her, and she gracefully accepted. I encourage you to follow her on Twitter and shoot her a friendly tweet about reading her story.  

(If you've missed any of the previous interviews, you can take a look as well: Richard Bailey, Pippa Hanson, Jessica Hodkinson and Chryssa Skodra.) 

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Farzana Baduel

1. As a short introduction, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

I am the Managing Director of Curzon PR, an award‐winning global strategic communications firm with offices in London, New York, Dubai and soon to be launched in Delhi, and a doting Mother.

It’s been four years since I’ve started this blog.

I never even dreamed of the many things that I would learn, achieve and get to do purely thanks to this blog that I once started just as an experiment.

I’m glad that I didn’t give up on it and continued investing my free time in learning, writing and sharing all that with you.

As the New Year is now upon us, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned while blogging in 2015 – a year of so much change, new experiences and aspirations.

Blogging at iliyanastareva.com – Fourth Year in Review:

There are three main learnings from 2015 from my blog and I’ll dive into each one of them below:

• Inbound marketing really works, even for a small site and blog whose traffic has now almost tripled in just one year of doing inbound marketing.
• PR students are actively searching for help online, whether for their dissertations or how to find a job.
• Evergreen content is the name of the game – it’s the best performing content that continues to bring traffic and conversions even if you don’t do much with it (but you should).

2016 is just three days away. It’s time not only for reflections and predictions but also for making resolutions – personal and professional.

For startups, too, this is the perfect timing to plan well for the New Year and focus on trying new things. After all, being agile is “in their blood”.

This is why I was so thrilled when I was invited to speak about my new inbound PR concept at a startup marketing meetup in Sofia last week.

Even though it was almost Christmas, we had a great turnout and I was happy to see so many people there interested in learning something new, attentively listening during my presentation, and then asking a lot of questions and introducing themselves to me to chat personally.  

Because of the timing – right before the end of the year – many of these entrepreneurs were there to find out what to focus on in 2016 and how to structure their efforts.

My presentation therefore not only introduced the inbound PR concept and how it differs from traditional PR, but also I gave them a lot of practical tips and actionable advice that they can implement right now, even if they don’t have a sophisticated software like HubSpot.