Keyword Research is an emergent process that stands out as the single most important step in developing content that answers the questions your customers are asking. As a bonus, Keyword Research significantly contributes in the development of intuitive site navigation and Information Architecture.

Conversion Optimization is also an emergent process tasked with increasing specific website goals such as improving lead generation, increasing sales or boosting opt-ins.

Analytics provide a means to track the success of our endeavour’s and check whether any Key Performance Indicators that have been set out are being achieved.

Keyword Research

To attract visitors via search engines your web pages must be deemed worthy enough to be returned in response to a user query. On the surface that’s simple enough to understand, however, in practice, the mechanics of making it happen can be mystifying. Especially to someone not fully cognisant of the methodologies allied with Keyword Research.

Figure 1: Questions and Answers

The worst case scenario is a website that fails to target any of the keywords that potential customers are using. Figure 1 above shows what happens in this case. Because your pages don’t use the keyword potential customers use to find your products they are seen as unrelated and won’t be returned by search engines. You are simply not answering the questions your customers are asking or you are using a language that is not common to the customer.

Convergence

The goal of keyword research is to align your pages with the keywords being used by potential customers. This necessarily means working from a common dictionary.

• Who are your customers?
• What are their needs, wants and goals?
• How would they express that as a keyphrase?

Figure 2: Engagement

As you can see in figure 2 above when your pages contain the words that potential customers are searching on we start to see convergence. Those pages will be deemed as relevant by search engines and be returned within their results.

There are other factors that determine how high the page will be returned in the results, in particular, how many links point to the page and what terms are used to form the link. On large sites, the power accumulated from navigational links might be all that is required to rank for terms with low levels of competition. Incidentally, Canada’s Web Shop provides Keyword Research and Link Building as part of our SEO services. OK that’s the gratuitous plug over for this post!

There is a caveat; traffic on its own doesn’t guarantee sales. Just because search engines think your page is relevant doesn’t mean visitors will think the same way. Also, search engines calculate relevance by analysing all of the content on your page, however, if you fail to engage human visitors with in the first few seconds they are gone and your content will never be read.

Engagement

Any judgements search engines make regarding relevancy and quality are, for the greatest part, arrived at programmatically. This means they might think a page is relevant if it matches the criteria they are looking for. However, if a search engine refers users to a page from which they immediately return, they can quickly determine that, on the human level, the page fails to engage. It is not in the interest of search engines to continue referring users to pages that are hastily abandoned and they will demote the rankings of pages where this proves to be a prolonged trend.

Figure 3: Engagement

In the head of the visitor, engagement might sound like this “At last someone who actually understands what I need”. There is an interesting statistic that has emerged from studying the buying habits of online consumers; it indicates that before someone feels comfortable enough to buy from your site, they need to have visited it on average around 5 or 6 times. During this time the keyphrases being used are likely to become more targeted as buyers refine their search parameters and gets closer to making a buying decision.

As a consumer moves through the buying cycle it is common for searches to start out as informational and later switch to transactional. To ensure your customers feel comfortable with your site and to build the levels of trust required to have them reach for their credit card, or even just submit their e-mail address through a form, target terms that will be searched throughout the buying cycle. Taking this approach will build awareness and trust at a much earlier stage than your competitors can manage, which stands you in good stead when the customer’s final buying decision has to be made.

Building awareness early helps influence the opinions of buyers, that said, you still need to consider engagement with pages targeting informational searches. Getting in front of researchers and potential buyers early is of little benefit if your pages are simply cookie cutters, stuffed with keywords and designed entirely for search engines. Although the term Search Engine Optimization seems to imply it’s all about search engines, nothing could be further from the truth. At the end of the day it’s soft fleshed humans that make the buying decisions not sophisticated bean counters that pass as search engines.

Conversions

According to the figure 3 above, it appears that each and every conversion is the culmination of a chain reaction:

• Conversions are dependent on Engagement.
• Engagement is dependent on Traffic.
• Traffic is dependent on Content.
• Content is dependent on Keyphrases.

It doesn’t require a genius to figure out that getting it wrong at the keyword level could seriously constrain the long term success of your website. Targeting the wrong keyphrases won’t stop search engines from finding and indexing your pages, however the result will be meaningless rankings for terms that never get searched. This can be a costly mistake in both lost revenue and the cost of developing the site in the first place. Keyword Research is fundamentally market research that returns invaluable insights into how to converse with customers and grow your business quickly. Some of those insights include:

• The products or services people are searching for.
• The language people use when searching for those products.
• How many people are searching.

Misconception

A common misconception is thinking that you already know the keyphrases customers would use. As the site owner what you really know are the terms you would use to find your website and those terms could be entirely different from those your customers will use to seek you out. You might be well versed in the jargon of your industry but it’s unlikely your customers will be as fluent as you. Industry jargon rarely lends itself to viable keyphrases. Often keyword research is best carried out by a third party who has no knowledge of your industry and can look upon things with a fresh unbiased eye.

Part I: When Push Turns To Pull
Part II: When Push Turns To Pull: Listening To Your Customers

Tags: conversion optimization, Interruption Marketing, Keyword Research, Online Marketing, pull marketing, push marketing, Reverse Broadcasting

This entry was posted by Chance Hoggan on Tuesday, July 26th, 2011 at 9:21 am and is filed under Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.