5 Tips for SEO – Keywords Part Two

As I promised last time. I told you I would keep giving you more information from my amazing brain. Read on to learn more about SEO.

Identify what your site needs

This can be a little difficult to figure out if you’re not familiar with your current web statistics, or if you haven’t quite got a handle on what people are doing when they browse your site. However, understanding this one little concept can help save you a lot of wasted marketing spend.

If your site isn’t seeing any traffic at all, then it’s pretty obvious – you’ll want to target keywords and phrases that will help you get more visitors to your site – that means targeting keywords with high monthly searches. Once you’ve got visitors to your site, you’ll be able to figure out if they’re browsing, engaging, and ultimately converting.

However, if your site is getting decent traffic each month, but you’re not seeing any difference in the number of inquiries and calls, then it could be a situation where you need to look at the type of traffic you’re getting. With an appropriate keyword mix, you can start to pre-qualify potential site visitors simply with a quick keyword phrase edit.

To demonstrate, take the above “widgets” example. If I had a site that had a ton of traffic, but I was seeing poor engagement, and even fewer conversions, then I’d look at setting up keywords and phrases that focused on “handmade widgets” or “reliable widgets”. I might even look at getting crazy, and setting up a strategy for “baldness treatments” or “blood pressure remedies”.

With little modifiers, you can set the stage for what type of person you want on your site. Maybe you don’t want every widget seeker, because not all of them want handmade widgets. The key here is that the more specific you make your keyword phrases, the higher quality traffic you’ll see. On the flip side, you’ll likely see less of this traffic, so you’ll have to determine what’s more beneficial to your company in the long run: high traffic with low conversions, or low traffic with high conversions.

Be realistic with expectations

This is the hardest part about keyword marketing. There are too many shysters in the web world that will promise to get your site to #1 on Google within a week. At this point, let’s just be clear – that’s pretty much a lie. They may be able to get you to #1 on Google, but it’s likely to be for keyword phrases that absolutely nobody (certainly not your target audience) will be searching for.

First off, keyword research is simply the start of your content strategy, and in order to see your site moving to the top of relevant searches, it’s going to take time, effort, attention, and analysis. Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for getting a site to rank organically on search engines.

When you look at your research, when you forecast the traffic, and when you imagine all the conversions that are possible, try to be realistic about the timeline within which results will be seen. If you’re marketing a new cola soft drink, chances are it’s going to take you a long (long, long, long) time to beat out a few major competitors. If you’re the only “handmade widget” manufacturer in the industry, then it will probably be easier.

Understand where you are in your marketplace, identify keywords and phrases that will be most beneficial to your business, and then prepare to engage in a content strategy for at least 3 – 6 months. If you require quick results or simply can’t commit to a longer-term plan, then you’ll need to look at Pay-per-click marketing (Google Adwords).

If, after a few months, you’re not seeing any change in your metrics, then you can go through and edit your strategies. But if you haven’t been realistic about your expectations, and you’re changing the strategies in a desperate attempt to see immediate results, you’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment right from the start.

Ultimately, time is the most important investment you’ll make on your keyword strategy, but with these little tips, you’ll be in a better position to choose keywords that can maximize your ROI.