We all want to attract lots of visitors to our website in the hope that they’ll be interested enough to buy from us, or at least make an enquiry. We research our keywords, find the ones with good volumes of traffic, target our pages etc etc, and hope that we’ll soon have visitors flocking to our site. OK, you might just get that, but is what you’re offering really what people are after?
We all know we need to optimise our web pages so we get found for keywords relating to our products and service and keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO. After all, how can you target your pages if you don’t know what people are searching on. In an ideal world, keyword research and SEO is done at the time of the web build so that the keywords targeted can be built into the site architecture.
However, the keywords that you think are going to bring in that all important traffic may not be the best converting keywords. I’ve recently read that 5+ keyword search queries increased 10% from January 2008 – January 2009 and about 20% of searches in the last 6 months on Google are brand new searches that have never been queried before. This means that people are becoming more specific with their searches and it means that you have to think beyond what the keyword tools are telling you. Often if you type in a very specific keyword into a keyword research tool, the volumes of searches are so low that they don’t record any number of queries.
Now, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t searching on them, but that very low volumes of searches may be carried out on them (if you wanted to, you could test out some of these niche keywords in a pay per click campaign). Obviously if you want to get a reasonable amount of traffic to you site, you need to look at the terms which are being searched on more regularly, but these very niche keywords are an ideal way of really giving people what they’re looking for. If your site comes up for a very specific search, it’s far more likely that the visitor will stick around on your site and a higher chance they will convert. For more general terms, people are more likely to shop around.
So if you’re targeting broader, higher traffic terms on your main pages, then start writing new content around the more niche key phrases – articles, blog posts etc. Really give people what they’re looking for and you’ll find you’ll attract much hotter prospects!
