How SEO Campaigns Can Bring Success to Your Website – Part III

In the final part of this 3 part article series, we round up our discussion of SEO and how to make it best work for your small business or freelance website.

Selecting Keywords by Commercial Intent

Not only should you organize keywords according to relevancy and specifically, you should make the additional effort to research which words lend themselves to commercial intent. Ideally you’ll be looking for words that relate to the end steps of the consumer buying process and indicate those on the edge of conversion.

This is important as such keywords are generally more effective at creating the ideal conditions for success. To do this you’ll want to consider specific categories such as:

• Products: Keywords that may belong to this category can include, ‘brand names,’ ‘affordable,’ ‘best,’ ‘cheapest,’ ‘comparison,’ ‘review’ and ‘premium’ for example.
• By Now: These keywords are used to communicate a certain level of immediacy and may include, ‘buy,’ ‘discount,’ ‘deals,’ ‘coupon’ and ‘free shipping’ amongst others.

By targeting these high commercial intent keywords, your site’s click-through rates can improve dramatically and will allow you to focus more time on what really matters – your conversion rates.

Creating a Plan for Effective Search Campaign Implementation

Once you’ve established a keyword hierarchy within your website you can then put that into action. Ensure that all your headings, article titles, URLs and meta-descriptions (including images) follow the vertical relevancy you’ve set out.

In this way you can ensure that your websites attract significant volumes of traffic and convert potential customers once they arrive. Remember to track this kind of information as you’ll need it when selling your portfolio on online marketplaces such as Flippa or others.

Implementing Pay-Per-Click Keyword Campaigns

Once you’ve created the conditions for the perfect revenue generating portfolio and have a marketing budget available, you’ll be able to take full advantage of what SEO campaigns have to offer.

Understanding that effective keyword grouping strategies are at the crux of your campaigns is essential – the more accurate you are the less will come out of your budget. Creating search campaigns is not an exact science however so don’t be discouraged if your efforts involve a lot of trial and error initially.

Maintaining Your Search Campaign Budget

Obviously everything you do with regards to your pay-per-click search campaigns will impact your bottom line and as such you should be aiming for efficiency above all else.

If your initiatives aren’t working the way you’d envisioned and you know your checkout process is fluid, you will have to go back to the research stage at the beginning of this article. Though hopefully you will have found this information relevant and now have a clearer picture moving forward.  

How SEO Campaigns Can Bring Success to Your Website – Part II

In part 2 of this 3 part article series, we continue to provide actionable tips for freelancers and small business owners to make SEO work for them.

The Anatomy of Effective Content Marketing

Keywords don’t capture everyone’s attention as your market will be comprised of many specific types of customers and they will each navigate to your websites in different ways.

The point of implementing effective keyword strategies is to improve your site traffic and conversion rates so that profitability enters the equation and generates interest among your potential buyers at auction.

With that in mind, you’ll need to be responsive and reactionary to the phrases your customers are searching and be aware of the fact that this is an ongoing process.

Understanding Your Target Audience

This comes down to recognizing the strengths of each of the websites within your portfolio and their function in appealing to your target audience. Identify which segments of your customer base account for the largest percentage of sales.

For example, if 20 percent of your target market is comprised of customers seeking high-end, premium quality products or services that are price and 35 percent simply wanted a mid-range or inexpensive option, which would be the better group of consumers to target?

The correct answer is both.

Keyword grouping strategies allow you to target these groups individually and across multiple campaigns in a co-ordinated way. As such, you will need to adjust your search campaigns either more specifically or generally depending upon who you’re targeting at any given point in time.

Understanding the Terminology of Search Campaigns

If you’re unfamiliar with using Google AdWords or other PPC platforms the process is generally straightforward. Defining the terminology however can be a different matter. Before reading further it is highly recommended that you familiarize yourself with the following:

• Campaign Types: determine which networks your campaigns will officially run across. Fortunately, the settings can be restricted for niche audiences or broadened to provide the widest reach possible if you so choose. 
• Ad groups: relate to the parameters of each of your search campaigns and includes your keyword groups, any accompanying budgets and any details regarding targeting in relation to your objective.
• Quality Scores: are measurements from Google based on the relevancy of your ad’s headline, description, keywords and destination URLs to your intended customers. A high quality score can reduce the cost of certain search campaigns.

Regardless of whether you’re just starting out or have been buying and selling websites for an extended period of time, you’ll need to implement such search campaigns on a case by case basis and create multiple campaigns to run over the same timeframe for consistency. 

The Role of Hierarchy in Keyword Search Terms

When making your keyword lists, make sure there will always be ways you can prioritize the importance of each term or phrase in relation to others within the group to establish a hierarchy.

As different topics gain traction, you can insert yourself into conversations by ‘newsjacking’ a story and piggy-backing off of the search campaigns of other, external sources. Internally, your content marketing efforts should incorporate keywords that link to other landing and product pages to maximize the cohesiveness of your website.