A Direct method of Compliance online

Comply Direct are a government approved compliance scheme for UK organisations obligated by the Packaging Waste Regulations and the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations.

We are a trusted and expert business and compliance partner for over 800 companies in the UK so Comply Direct have made it our aim to develop an online presence to ensure that searchers get exactly what they are looking for when making compliance and guidance queries into search engines and on social media.

Understanding search terms

Not everyone understands waste compliance at a glance – it can be a tricky minefield of keywords (such as Packaging compliance) and search queries (such as Who is obligated?) on the web so a keyword plan is essential to ensure that we offer an organic helping hand to our target audience by capturing their actual search queries.

In the waste regulation market we know that Comply Direct offer more support and engagement in compliance activities for obligated businesses than any other scheme, we’ve done the research; so, the tools and techniques gained from the Search and Social Media Marketing course will enable us to develop a SSMM strategy which promotes us as a resource as well as a service.

Keyword optimisation is the essential starting place in developing a blended (hybrid) strategy. Keywords, keyword phrases and longtail search terms help define integrated search engine optimised page content, meta data, social media campaigns and PPC campaigns to keep us competitive and relevant.

Keyword planning

Like many service providers, we are pretty niche product so I challenged the Comply Direct team to come up with keyword ideas based on their interaction with customers.

The terms gathered, combined with competitor analysis and keyword suggestions using Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner tool have been spreadsheeted and search queried in the major search engines to see what terms are already being targeted by our competition and the organic SERPs to analyse which keywords have a high value and which would be low yield.

The top keywords from this analysis are currently being tested as a part of the Comply Direct PPC campaign where I am tracking impressions and conversions to a relevant landing page on the Comply Direct website.

So far it seems as though the longtail keywords are working better for capturing meaningful conversions. The next step will be making sure that these keywords form the basis of our content strategy by making tweaks to our copy, alt tags, meta data and Social Media keywords.

Longtail goes a long way

We’re in it for the long term with our target audience as mostly we’re looking to convert from campaign to customer when they are at a later stage of the buying cycle but a fully structured campaign should make sure we’re more visible, more trusted and consistently competitive.

Thanks for reading, if you haven’t got much time on your hands but you’re looking for more information regarding keyword research, the Moz blogs have proved an invaluable resource to me. I would highly recommend the Beginners Guide to SEO: Keyword Research to start you off.

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