Clicksharp Marketing

Organic keyword research provides a variety of insights essential to your marketing campaigns. Often times, it’s the best way to qualify marketing ROI in a low-risk environment, before you’re ready for the main stage.

We’re resuming Website Analytics 001, in which we review some of the prerequisite fundamentals to effective analysis of website traffic. Last time we looked at #1, discussing keyword research and analysis for branded versus non-branded terms. Now we’ll look in-depth at #2:

1. It’s not hard to get a top search engine ranking for your company and brand name.
2. Your traffic from pay-per-click ad campaigns will be vastly different in nature than in organic search engine results — but the insights are transferable.
3. Your customers may articulate their needs better than you predicted.

A lot of people look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as polar opposites, and they’ve got a point. After all, organic search is free, and paid search is… that’s right, not free. It goes far beyond that. Within the organic search results, you the marketer retain much less control over the presentation of your website compared to paid search — which text appears, which link the keyword query triggers, even who will see it. And don’t forget that once you get your link up there on the page, massaging your rankings in organic search is a vastly different process than in paid search.

But there’s another important distinction to make. Traffic from SEM, which comes primarily through paid search advertising campaigns, tends to convert at a better rate. The people who click on ads within the sponsored links are, on average, further along in the buying process than those who click on the organic side. Their wallets are out and they’re hovering over the Buy Now button.

Does this mean you’re going to ignore the other prospects?

Of course not. Prospects that arrive via organic search are potentially a much larger population, and come free of charge — so if you can find a way to understand their activity on your website, you’ll have a better chance at converting these folks at a much lower acquisition cost.

How do you do this? Start by setting up conversion Goals in Google Analytics. For instance, you can create a trigger so that every time a user reaches the “Thank You For Contacting Us” page, it registers a goal. Then, once you have a good sample size of goals from which to draw, you can go back and analyze the patterns.

Then you can pull out a few trends which will speak volumes. We’ll use the example of an auto mechanic:

• Your website lists a wide variety of repair and maintenance services, but you only advertise for a core handful of terms. You find that a disproportionate amount of people reach your site by googling “emissions testing” for your zip code. Time to have your agency write a few ads targeting this service.
• You find that “auto repair” and related keywords are quite expensive in paid search… but based on a handful of visits for that keyword query in organic search, you see that those visitors end up contacting you 3x more frequently. It’s probably worth paying a little bit more for those keywords.
• Your most active organic keyword, i.e. the one driving the most unique visits to your site from natural search engine results, is “oil change.” It’s driving huge sums of traffic and converting well, and yet you’re only ranked #8 in Google for that keyword. Seems like with that kind of critical mass, jumping up even just a few spots in the rankings would have a profound effect! Now you know exactly what to tell your SEO agency.

A variety of other unique examples could apply to your unique business models — but the end game is always the same: organic keyword research serves as a cheap and powerful form of market research for your higher-ticket marketing campaigns.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 @ 7:40 am on the category SEM, SEO, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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