May 10, 2016 | 3 minute read Prioritizing Factors of Keyword Targeting
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By: Carrie Miller
Balancing.
How to balance the effectiveness of keywords and key phrases with the added boost in your website metrics and the boost in your website prospects is a difficult thing. On one hand, you want the additional keywords to bring traffic and increase your rankings within the search engines, but you also want to ensure that the traffic that you are generating actually contains viable potentials for leads.
That is the main thought for this post – how to balance your research and choices by taking into account the prioritizing factors mentioned below.
Pay Per Click (PPC) testing.
Google and Bing have built themselves around understanding the most profitable key phrases based on your website. When setting up your let’s just say Google PPC, you will start off with a list of topics that you believe describe your site and that people will use when searching for your product or service. Sounds simple, right? Well, after some testing, you might come to realize that you were a bit too broad, and that the traffic you’re getting is costing you a fortune and not panning out with conversions. That is why it is always a good idea that when using Google AdWords or Microsoft Bing Ads, that you start off with utilizing their testing features to verify that what you think are the right keywords/phrases are actually going to be your best prospects for searching.
Hot Topics.
As with this blog post, there are some topics that are just hot – and will likely stay hot, and then there are the trending hot topics. Focusing some of your energy on these hot topics can equal instant traffic for your site. I should also mention that these hot topics you focus in on should in some way pertain to the product or service – even distantly. You want people who are searching out these topics to be potential customers, right?
Not sure what topics are hot in your industry? As always, Google has you covered with Google Trends. Simply go to this page, type in the keyword/phrase you are interested in, and see how it is trending right now, over the past two years, what ever helps you.
Branded Key Phrases.
First, what exactly is a branded key phrase? Branded key phrases are phrases that you or your business ‘own’ instead of those non-specific key phrases that are more generalized. An example would be “Visual Visitor Anonymous Visitor Identification” is a branded key phrase, as opposed to “anonymous visitor identification” which is a non-branded key phrase. Since our goal is to take as many of the top ranking spots from search results, either to drive more traffic to your site, to take traffic from your competitors, or to stop negative results from taking top spots, we need to maximize on those branded key phrases.
Keyword(s) to grow on.
As you go through these first steps in growing your keyword presences, make sure that you are thinking not just today with the hot topics, but also next year. Are your keywords/phrases scalable? Will they represent your company long term, or are they just trending words that you will be rethinking in six months or so? Growing your online presence through keywords and ranking is not a quick or easy task, you need a solid foundation of stable keywords/phrases that you can be sure will benefit your business over the long-term. This is a process that you can grow over time, add in fresh phrases as needed, but if you are just starting or if you are looking to correct a previously faulty path, you will want to take the time to really be choosy with your list!
In Conclusion.
As I usually do, I would like to reference how Visual Visitor and their anonymous visitor identification product can benefit your company in this instance. The team at Visual Visitor is well aware of the importance of keywords, that is whey they have tracked keywords as part of their analytics package. They also go as far as to track the keywords used by company visitor. Now you will not only know that your visitors are using words/phrases like Anonymous Visitor Identification, but you will also know that business ABC used that phrase, they tried the product, and then they signed up! Every piece of information, no matter how small it might seem, will tell you something about the traffic you are getting, the traffic you are missing, and the customers you are keeping!
