Clicksharp Marketing

You know your business very well — sometimes too well. Beware the pitfalls of choosing the most obvious keywords to target for SEO campaigns.

Here’s a riddle for you: could it be you and your customers speak a different language? (Photo by wlscience)

For the third and final installment of Metrics That Matter’s Organic Keyword segment — affectionately dubbed Website Analytics 001 — we’re going to wrap up a final major insight which can be gleaned from information you already possess (in the organic keywords section of your analytics data). It’s #3 from the list below:

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.

For instance, let’s assume you’re one of those “digital” entrepreneurs selling health care products directly from an e-commerce site. Your domain name includes the term “health care,” you’ve worked this term into much of your site copy, and you’re pretty confident you can bring in good search engine traffic for the “health care products” keyword — because you’ve done your homework on all your SEO. One fine morning, you google the term “health care products”… and there you are on the first page.

But after you’ve already thrown the party to celebrate this momentous achievement (and left guests wondering if the dry ice machine was just a *bit* overkill), you look at your organic keyword traffic, and are in for a shock: “health care products” — your core business and the mantra of all your web-based communications — is not anywhere near the top of the list. Instead, the list is topped with terms like these:

• suntan lotion
• deodorant
• cough syrup
• antacids

You may not even be on page one, or even close for these terms — yet they’re driving more traffic to your site than the query “health care products.”

This happens when we make assumptions about how our customers search for products and services in a search engine.

The aforementioned are all health care products, yes, but they’re much more than that — they occupy more refined categories of consumer products. To you, the vendor, they’re all health care products. But the customer usually likes to find what they’re looking for quickly, so why search for “health care products” when they know there’s a more targeted way to get what they’re looking for?

They won’t. You can pre-emptively avoid this miscommunication by doing proper keyword research prior to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. SEOBook’s Keyword Tool is a great place to start. (Incidentally, it was this tool which illuminated the fact that all those products mentioned in the bulleted list receive more queries than “health care products.”)

Moral of the story — never make assumptions about how your customer shops. Major retailers have big budgets to do behavioral analysis, for this very reason. Lucky for you, you have Google Analytics and other analytical platform with which to analyze keyword traffic. A little homework up front, added to some attention along the way, will ensure that you and your customers are speaking the same language.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

Right now, nothing comes to mind.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 @ 11:34 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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