Unfortunately this is not a unique post, in fact it is something I have harped on about a lot before - but it seems extremely relevant to me at the moment as I have had two incidents recently where I have seen that people don’t understand the concept of keywords with regard to visitor numbers to a website and more importantly the business purpose of the website.

Let me explain; your website exists for a specific purpose, whether it is to sell bed nights for your hotel, or tours, or houses on a real estate site, or rental properties as in the case of the property development guys I had lunch with yesterday, or in the case of many sites, just as source of information. The biggest mistake is to get trapped in the game of focussing purely on visitor numbers, that is, all search engine and marketing effort you put in focusses just on increasing visitor numbers, without a commensurate focus on real website purpose - say for example selling bed nights. Let me put it another way, if Xebidy reduced the overall number of visitors to your site but doubled the number of people booking a nights stay in your hotel would you say that the search engine and Internet Marketing strategy was a success or a failure?

Hopefully, a success - the return on investment is better. So, one of the most important steps in this regard is the selection of keywords that you will focus on in your marketing efforts to attract customers to your site. This is not rocket science, identify your target market, if you sell tours in Northern Territory to 35+ age group then targeting keywords such as “backpacker bus” and “backpacker tours” is a waste of time and effort, the result is that you will have a high bounce rate on your website. That means, visitors are coming to your site from search results expecting to see some information based on their search query and instead seeing something different so therefore immediately leaving your site. Step 2, identify the search queries that your target market is using, assuming then that you appear high up in the search results page for your selected terms, the higher the search volume the better. If you can find that getting high rank results in search engines for a particularly competitive terms (say Sydney hostel) is difficult, then target more specific terms that might be easier to rank with but nonetheless are more likely to lead to conversion (purchase etc) of visitors on your site. Studies have shown that the more words a user puts into their search query the more likely they are to be a purchaser.

Finally, the keywords you select should be proprietary information, they should be your competitive advantage. If you approach your keyword phrases with a great deal research and then refining them ongoing based on your analytics, which terms lead to more sales, which terms don’t - this is not something you should be telling everyone. We can use lots of tools such as Spyfu to try and work out what competitor keyword terms are, but at the end of the day only you know your sales figures. More importantly, you should be setting up goal conversions and funnels in your analytics packages so that you can see what customers are doing on your site when they come to your site from particular search terms and identifying which ones make you money.

Let’s sum up with a hypothetical example, Bob has a tour company running backpackers around New Zealand. 40% of Bob’s market is Americans, 40% English, 10% Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities thereafter. Bob’s competitors all rate very highly for the terms Backpacker Bus and Backpacker tours - Bob doesn’t. But Bob does do well for some nice generic terms such as New Zealand and Queenstown, and even adventure travel, he has spent a great deal of money targeting these terms. But, he hardly makes any sales online - why not? Because, when someone comes to his site from the search term New Zealand they leave it again. They were not looking for a backpacker tour they were looking for information on New Zealand. Xebidy do the analyse of the search terms with Bob and discover that before his market travel to New Zealand 90% of them do not use the term Backpackers. In the US Backpackers are people that go hiking in the bush and camping. In fact, Bob discovers through his analyse of his market that most of his American market are students and that the main search terms they use are in fact budget travel, student travel and student vacation. Wow and behold, this is a long way off from “backpacker”. Bob reworks his strategy, suddenly his web sales to his America market sky rockets. He does the same for his UK and Canadian market, identifying the keywords that they use in search engines and targeting his site to match. An interesting thing occurs, Bob receives the same amount of traffic as before but from different sources. He receives less customers reaching his site for non-specific terms like Queenstown and more traffic for specific terms like “cheap bus travel New Zealand” and his sales go through the roof. The last thing he is going to do is announce to his competitors, hey I found where all the business is!

Sounds too simple? It is! But it is staggering the number of people I talk to who don’t get it. They want to target broad keywords terms that don’t generate sales, that try to be everything to everyone, and interestingly enough they don’t identify their market. The use of “bus” for companies selling tours, “hotel” for companies selling hostels and Queenstown Restaurants for a company that leases commercial space properties in Queenstown. Go figure!

Tags: keywords, SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Opinion. 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.