Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published October 16, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Third in a series of articles on SEO and website marketing appearing every Thursday.

In “Keyword Mania” we discussed how all the words on your website are keywords.  However, some of the words are the true key words that really drive people to your site.  Good website statistics programs including Google Analytics list what words are being used to find a website.

Google Analytics will list the top keywords, but other software can give you a much more comprehensive list of words.   Any one set of statistics is seldom enough to create a whole picture of a website; several used together can give a better view of what is going on and help you decide how to adjust your website to get better results.

For example two important statistics to keep in mind are Average Monthly Search Volume and Pages Found in Google.   The Search Volume tells you how many people entered specific word combinations that lead them to your webpage into the Google search engine.  Clearly you want focus in on the words with the highest values.  It is not necessary to focus on words which only two or three people use within a month.

On the other hand these keywords need balance out with the number of pages which are competing to use the same words.  If there are over five hundred thousand other pages found using the same words then it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.  Clearly what to do is to find keywords which have a high search volume but are unique to your website.  These are the words that you want to target to be your website’s top words.

All companies should avoid trying to guess what their keywords are and go with the information provide by the analytical software. The only time one should guess at what the keywords are is when the site is brand new and there is no history to go by.   However after your site has been ‘live’ for a week to a month, you should be able to see what the trends are using the statistical software.

I have occasionally run across companies which have firmly believed that certain words were their keywords and were doing everything in their power to promote them without positive results.  An example of this is when a company believes that their advertising slogan should be their keywords.  Can you imagine a software company who’s slogan is “Best Financial Software in the World” trying to make that their keywords to be pushed to number one on Google?  This also ignores the fact that that slogan comes back with a search result of 17,400,000 pages.

A better combination for this company would be a combination of the words such as “financial”, the type of software it is such as “purchase order” and of course the name of the company or the name of the software itself.    The correct choice of words to focus on is unique for each website and company, be careful of jumping to conclusion or simply copying what someone else has done.  Finding the correct words which will bring people to a website is key to insure the website doesn’t get lost in the World Wide Web.

With a better handle on what are good keywords it is time to move on and start talking about website design.  In the next article we will go over Machine vs. Man.