For this week’s assignment we were to use SEO functions to choose the best keywords that would target our desired demographic. I began by identifying a competitor of Black Hills Energy, which I considered NorthWestern Energy. I took the competitor’s URL (https://www.northwesternenergy.com/#) and pasted it into THEHOTH, which is a free Google rank checker. From there I identified rankings with high search volume and low traffic.
From here I notice that ‘northwestern energy’, ‘power outage map’, ‘northwestern energy Montana’, and ‘northwestern energy bill pay’ are all good options. Personally I choose power outage map because that is something that is relevant to Black Hills Energy consumers as well. But after plugging that into our keyword generator I unfortunately found no results. Therefore I moved down the list and typed in Black Hills Energy (similar to that of the northwestern energy we got from the top-trafficked keyword list) and came back with the following.
From here I see the following trend: many of our customers are trying to contact us. That leads me to choose ‘customer service’ because it seems important to our clientele. It has an easy KD but good search traffic. I then took customer service over to my ‘Google Trends’ window and entered it there and got the following.
I see that it is searched mostly in Georgia and under related inquiries there seems to be only searches for businesses’ customer service phone number. Therefore, I believe my next option will be “Black Hills Energy Customer Service Phone Number”.
Unfortanelty when I when I went to the free keyword generator there was no search of that. So after multiple trails I searched “black hills energy customer service number” and got one match with an easy KD!
I was in search of 3 more keywords for Black Hills Energy so I then typed in ‘home energy’ into Google Trends and was given a related query of ‘consumer energy’. There you can see the three medium ranked KD’s which are ‘consumer energy bill pay’, ‘consumer energy outage’, and ‘consumer energy alliance’. This gives me a total of 4 keywords for this section.
I took the knowledge I gained here and headed to Google Ads and entered several keywords about the business related to energy, South Dakota, customer service, bills, and efficiency.
From here I took the top six words and took them into Ahrefs’ keyword generator. I used only words with an easy KD and it cam back the 6 words I would use are: how to lower electric bill in apartment, why is my electric bill so high, Midwest power, how to lower power bill in summer, where to place carbon monoxide alarms, and black hills energy careers.