The Trouble With Keywords
If you are reading this blog you probably want to increase your knowledge about keywords – most likely because you have an online business and want to improve your rankings for certain search terms. I’m not going to go into Keyword Research & Analysis here (I’ll save that for another time) – all I will say is DO IT and do it before you get started on any other Search Engine Optimisation tasks.
In an ideal world we would all know which keywords we want to rank well for and build our websites already optimised for those keywords. In practise that rarely happens but it really isn’t too much of a problem because keywords are a moving target and change over time. If you want your online business to grow you will need to constantly review your keywords to keep pace with changing products changing fashions or changing terminology. What was popular 2 years ago in many markets is probably not now. And if the product or service don’t actually change, the words people use to search for them do – you only have to look at you Google Analytics Keyword data and you are sure to find some surprising keywords bringing visitors to your site (and I don’t mean long-tail keywords either). Take SEO as an example – terminology is changing and it is starting to be described as inbound marketing or internet marketing, which is perhaps a better description as it is essentially a way of marketing your website and online business.
So you start your SEO campaign with a list of the keywords most important to you – if you (or someone else) has done their keyword research thoroughly this will be a group of keywords ranging from low to high traffic terms. Unfortunately I have seen the results of previous SEO campaigns that have targeted all low traffic keywords – they may be easy to rank well for but what’s the point of being on Page 1 of Google if you only get 100 visitors a week and far less conversions. Believe me I have seen examples like that.
But assuming you have a decent starting list and a decent amount of SEO knowledge, then you will, eventually rank well for your keywords providing you are not working in a super-competitive field like gambling or diet products.
And once you are ranking well you will start to see visitor numbers rising – you might then focus for a while on maintaining those rankings and improving your bounce rate and conversion rate. Bounce rate is simply the percentage of visitors who leave your website without looking any further than the first page they landed on. Once you are used to a certain level of visitors, sales and profit you may want to grow your business even more. So then you have to go back to the drawing board with keyword research and start the process again. It is always recommended that keyword research and analysis is carried out right at the start of an SEO campaign but that just gets you to the first level of success. If you want your business to continue to thrive it really is an ongoing process.