On Page SEO

How do we decide which keywords to target?

Our goal is to generate revenue. SEO is about getting the right kind of visitors. How much is a keyword worth to your website? If you own an online shoe store, do you make more sales from visitors searching for “brown Nike shoes" or “white boots?" To quantify the value of a keyword, we need to obtain data for the revenue / conversion and conversion rate of the keyword. Once we have this data, then we can make keyword decisions.

Low hanging keyword fruit

The best way to see quick improvements, is to go after the low-hanging fruit. In the world of keywords, the low hanging fruit is usually the top revenue generating keywords. As such, it usually makes sense to list keywords by revenue (or contact form submissions), and allocate a significant part of the initial budget to do SEO for these keywords.

On page seo

Choosing keywords is imporant, but how to you modify you website so that you show up in Google searches for the keywords we chose? The solution is targeting the messaging to your customers, while paying a small attention to keywords. It starts with asking the right question.

Where do we start?

The best way to obtain quick results is to look for keywords where you’re between position #11 and #50 in Google. When we get these keyword into the top 10, you see a significant traffic increase. Often, we can look at analytics to see where the traffic is coming from, and build on that traffic. But, if we don’t have enough traffic data in Google analytics, we will look at the data in Google webmaster tools. We’ll use this and a few other keyword tools to generate an initial list to target.

Phase II keywords

Short term success is very important, but we need to be focused on the long term as well. Here’s how we choose long term keywords. High revenue / sale. We’re often faced with the choice of giving you 20 sales of a product worth $100, or 5 sales of a product worth $1,000. We find 90% of the time, it’s best to focus on the more expensive products and services you offer.

Let’s find and choose very specific keywords. When people enter the buying process, they search for a vague phrase. An example might be “shoes”. As they get closer to making a purchase, they search phrase get’s more specific. We want your people to find you when they’re ready to make a buying decision. So, we need to show up for specific phrases.

We look for keywords that have little competition, high search demand, strong relevance to your industry, and high revenue / visitor. It’s not about just increasing traffic. We find keywords where the traffic converts into leads, and more importantly, sales.

Essentially, we’ll build a list of keywords that are:

  • Relevant to your business,
  • Keywords where we feel we can get a good revenue / visitor, and
  • Keywords where we are close to a top 10 ranking in Google.

Ready to get started? Or, do you have questions? We’d love to talk with you. Give us a call @ (775) 419-3476 and ask to speak with Chris Bergstrom.

Ask yourself these questions

  • Who is your typical customer?
  • Are some customers better than others? If so, describe the ideal customer, and explain why they’re different than other customers.
  • What is their pain that you solve?
  • What is your unique selling proposition? Why should your customers use you instead of your competition?
  • What messaging do you use (2-3 sentences) that explain both what your customers pain is, and how you solve it better than anyone else?

Usually, it’s good idea to mke sure we understand what keywords are driving traffic to the page. This way, we can be sure to match messaging to customers questions.

Adwords management

interested in the effect of specific keyword rankings to your top line, we can just buy Adwords traffic. If the traffic generates revenue, then we no that it’s probably a good idea to do SEO for the keywords. This is better then spending time and money doing SEO for a set of keywords, only to discover 5-6 months later that the traffic is worthless.

Learn more about our data driven Adwords management services.

I deeply understand my customers needs. Now what?

Write a few words down on a napkin that clearly articulate your customer’s pain. Next, explain why your business is the perfect partner to solve this pain. Take a picture of the napkin, and email the picture to me. We need to work on this messaging, and make sure that it’s obvious to people that visit your site that they need to contact you right now. Once this messaging is perfected, we add relevant keywords, and watch conversion rates, revenue / visitor, and rankings soar.

Really? A napkin?

OK, maybe just email it to me. But, I like the napkin analogy. You can’t fit too many words on a napkin. It forces you to be concise. So, pretend you’re writing on a napkin. But, napkins are hard to write on. Go our for lunch, and write on the back of an envelope. It’s kind of fun, and then we can do a “back of the envelope calculation".

Once we understand your business, it's time to choose keywords.

Here's how we do that.
KEYWORD DEMAND
It would be great to rank #1 for the keyword "shoes" ... or would it? It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these popular search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what's called the "long tail" of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, comprise the majority of the world's search volume.
KEYWORD VALUE
How much is a keyword worth to your website? We setup conversion goals for our clients. Conversion goals tell us the conversion rate, and revenue per visitor for each keyword. When we augment this revenue per visitor data with keyword search demand, we understand the big picture. It's impossible to make good keyword decisions without data. We collect data, predict that a specific set of keyword rankings will have on your bottom line, and then make a data driven decision.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Where do we get all of this knowledge about keyword demand and keyword referrals? From research sources like Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool, Google Trends, Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence, and Wordtracker's Free Basic Keyword Demand. Google's AdWords Keyword Planner tool is the best tool for SEO keyword research. It not only suggests keywords and provides estimated search volume, but also predicts the cost of running paid campaigns for these terms. To determine volume for a particular keyword, be sure to set the Match Type to [Exact] and look under Local Monthly Searches. Remember that these represent total searches. Depending on your ranking and click-through rate, the actual number of visitors you achieve for these keywords will usually be much lower.
BUSINESS ANALYSIS
The first step is to gather the information we need to understand your business. We need to understand what business units and cutomer demographics drive revenue and create high return on investment.