When I first moved from working primarily on promotions and sales in a brick and mortor shop to online retail one of the hardest concepts for me to grasp was search marketing.
I understood that keywords were words or phrases of words that people typed into Google or some other search engine to find what they were looking for, and I knew that getting a listing in the top results for those words was vital to obtaining traffic.
But I was naive as to how online searchers function, and wrongly assumed that since I was selling women’s clothes and lingerie that I simply needed to focus on basic keywords like “lingerie”, “bras” and “panties”; and the shoppers would come.
What I have learned since then about the methods of searchers has shown me that ranking high, even for a word that gets tons of searches every month, does not mean you’re going to see any additional sales.
As a matter of fact, ranking well for the wrong keywords is going to drain your resources, everything from costly server bandwidth to labor time, and can end up costing you more money than it generates for you.
The key is to rank high for your most effective keyword terms. Even when they result in less traffic. And to do that you have to be intuitive, you have to place yourself in the mindset of your customer and deduce how they might search for the products you offer; and you need to watch your monthly stats for insights into your customer’s minds based on the terms they do find your site with, because you can often find gems there that you hadn’t thought of and build upon them.
Once you start finding the terms that bring qualified buyers to your site, even though they may result in fewer daily visitors than broader and more generic terms do, you’ll start seeing the impact on your bottom line.
I would much rather rank high for 5 terms like “PRODUCT blue free shipping” which may only get a hundred searches per day each, than for almost any single word that gets thousands of daily searches; simply because people searching for a product by color and shipping options is looking to make a purchase. People searching for a single word can have a million different motivations for making their search, and none of them may be to purchase anything.
In the end keyword research for marketing purposes is all about first recognizing the type of visitor you want to attract to your web site, and then understanding how they might “drill down” beyond the single word terms to find exactly what they’re looking for… and then developing content that will rank high for those terms.
Tags: keyword research, keywords, retail
link building…
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