Thursday, June 20, 2013

How Keywords Affect Business Results

Keywords are the terms which describe the theme or subject addressed in a piece of content on a webpage or blog. In the world of SEO they are the terms your potential customers are searching for using search engines. Therefore, you will tailor the content on your website to include those keywords, thus driving more organic traffic to your website. Once you have identified the keywords you wish to target, you can begin creating content centered around those terms, creating page titles that contain the keywords and generating links to those pages using anchor text that relates to those terms.

Having determined your keywords and started creating content around those terms, it is time to start measuring their success at attracting visitors to your website and engaging those visitors to the point of making a purchase. Your keywords may be very successful at increasing the traffic to your website, but if the increase in traffic is not related to a corresponding increase in conversions then your strategy will ultimately fail.

By monitoring the sources of your traffic and the keywords that are driving traffic to your website you can evaluate how effective your keyword targeting has been. Then, by monitoring the customer journey your visitors take through the conversion paths you have created on your website, you can conclude which keywords are actually resulting in increased sales and are helping to grow your business.

Analysing the keywords which are proving most successful can have significant implications for the development of your business as a whole. When used from a market research point of view they can help you to better define your product/market fit, which can it turn help to guide future product development. It can also help you to identify the elements of your product or solutions which are most attractive to your prospective customers. This can lead to some surprising results, and can even result in your company pivoting away from its original offering or messaging, once the data indicates that your initial approach has been out of sync with the needs of your market and a revised strategy proves more effective.

Once the results of your keyword analysis start to flow in, you can begin the process of planning and creating new content which will capitalize on your findings. Focusing on your revised list of keywords, you can create content which builds out on your existing pages, and provide links back to your previous ranked pages, thus boosting them further in the search rankings and driving more high quality traffic your website. Your goal is to create content which will both attract, inform and convert traffic from your ideal customers.