Keyword research is, for me, the most important part of any SEO campaign. They are the base of your strategy. They help you adopt the right on-page optimization, they allow you to know the links you need to get and the anchor texts you will have to use etc. Then, after all your efforts, you see improvements in your traffic and on your sales.
Basically, SEO is about optimizing your pages for the keywords that people are looking for based on tools like Wordtracker, Overture, or Google adWords Keyword tool etc.
You build your content around those keywords mainly. But most of the time, people focus too much on keywords data, that they forget one thing. Keywords tools do not predict what search terms people are going to use in the future!They also don’t give you the less popular keywords which can be very important.
That’s why you need to be creative and anticipate what your audience is going to look for in the search engines. You need to create pages that are going to be the anwsers to the questions that people are going to ask before purchasing the products or services that you sell.
Just like in the real life, if you’re a sales rep and have a meeting with a prospect, you have to make sure you are going to be ready for all the questions he might ask you.
For example, let’s say someone is interested in buying some extra memory for his laptop. Good thing for you, you sell laptop memory and your site is well optimized for general keywords such as “laptop memory” , “cheap laptop memory”, “notebook memory” “toshiba laptop memory” etc…
So let’s say that this potential client is willing to know how to install laptop memory before buying, he just wants to make sure it’s easy to do. So he goes to google and types in “laptop memory installation“. Let’s see: 2,760,000 results but I only see 3 results that look very relevant to me, the first 3 ones. That person is very likely to click on one of these, look at the title tags used: they are very attractive, aren’t they? So he clicks on one of those, let’s say the second link: http://www.directron.com/howtoupmem.html
The article is very educative and perfectly explains how to install memory on a laptop. Fine, the visitor is reassured, he feels good now and he decides to buy from this web site.
Also, look at the competition on Google for that term: it doesn’t seem too hard for me to rank well for that keyword. A good link title with the words “laptop memory installation” and a good content should help you a lot.
You should always try to build content according to the keyword data you obtained from different tools, but also according to what people are likely to type in when doing a search, that is less competitive keywords, or ‘non-ecommerce related keywords’. By doing so, you are just going to have more advantages compared to your competitors who just optimize for the exact same keywords as everyone in your industry.
Those are some excellent points about finding ways to bring visitors to a site in a creative manner that will not only increase traffic, but also conversions.
You’ve also pinpointed the very real value of getting a sales representative at the table when you are discussing optimizing a site, so that you can have him or her share with you some of the questions that people ask that aren’t on the pages of that site.
Cheers.
Thanks, Bill. Exactly, you should meet with any people or department related to the web site’s services or products. It’s not just about optimizing your site with keywords, it’s also about getting the confidence of your visitors.
great advice nadir. “anticipation” can be a key to success. another example is anticipating future products, events, or other news. if you have an inside scoop, review, or opinion on a yet to be released item or event you can have that article indexed and receiving traffic for that keyword before most others. Then when the item is released and the flood of searchers are looking for info, it’s a perfect follow up opportunity and the early article gives you some cred.
siXcrookedhighways, I like your idea too. The earlier you will talk about something, the more traffic you’ll get. If you get a few links to your “scoop”, you’re likely to stay on the top of the search engine results for a while.