March 24, 2009 on 9:58 am
Filed Under:SEO
When it comes to pursuing any sort of venture in the realm of Web Marketing, you need to start with keywords to get any sort of handle on what’s going to happen next. From simple Search Engine Optimisation to fine-tuning your sales funnel to get better conversions (and other markety-sounding terms that I can bust out with the best of ‘em), you need to know what people are more likely to type into that query box.
It’s not just that li’l ol’ search phrase either, that will tell the tale. It’s what they’ll do after based on how they got there. “create photo book” is more than likely someone searching for a website that will either sell them a photo book package or direct them to a brick-and-mortar establishment that will help them build their own. “digital photo book” gets a bit trickier, in that it may be someone that’s looking for exactly the same thing as the previous, but it is more likely to be someone looking for a product that operates similar to a regular photo book but has a digital display, similar to digital photo frames.
One may be easier to rank for and one may show that your website is already ranking fairly well for it. Heck, it may even show that you’re getting substantial amounts of traffic to your site based on searches for that phrase. This may or may not be a good thing.
Here’s where the analytics kicks in, and we see where your visitors went after that. It’s called a “Bounce rate” and it can tell us a lot about whether or not “digital photo book” people left your site after seeing that you’re more about regular old paper “photo books” and not the digital variety at all.
The downside is that without the website traffic, analytics really don’t tell us much, and we’re left to what amounts to a fair bit of guesswork. Big Googs themselves provide estimates on monthly search numbers, but being that they’re just estimates and there’s really no benefit to them in providing actual search data (I’m sure they’ll find a benefit before too long and then find a way to charge us for it) we are still left just taking our best shot.
That’s where the psychology of it shows up, and we have to do our best to understand not only our client’s business, but the mentality of those that are seeking it as well.
And picking the best keyword for this is where that starts.