Your website is a business. Every visitor you get has a cost. You might say that search engine traffic is free, but it took you or your SEO firm a lot of time and potentially a lot of money to generate it. The fact is that even when people make what they think is an informed keyword decision for a given page, it’s usually not analyzed enough. Here’s a simple process to see what terms you should really use.
1) Generate a list of keywords that you know get traffic
You can actually use Google Adwords or Overture to get this and you can use the Overture data for free. It’s not complete, it’s not always sensitive to the traffic levels you might expect in your country, but it’s there and it’s a good indicator. Put that list in order of traffic generated in searches/day.
2) Do some searches in Google to find the top 10 sites for the keywords that generate the most traffic. Check the number of backlinks to the site using the “link:wwww.yoursite.com” search in Google. Now check your site using the same method. It’s not always true, but it’s a good rule of thumb that your site cannot rank in the top 10 unless it has a competitive number of links listed in Google when compared to the top 10 rated sites for the term you want.
3) Keep moving down the list until the sites that are in the top 10 have link counts that are similar to yours. Now you are in the zone. Smart Keyword placement throughout your page will usually give you a good shot at ranking in the top 10 given that the linking is comparable to your competition. There are a lot of good articles on this already.
4) If you are not happy with the search terms that this method points out as possible and you want to shoot for a higher traffic keyword then you need a plan. That plan can be to purchase the keywords that you feel describe your business and your customers needs from a PPC search engine. The plan could also be to improve your linking scores and bring your site into the zone where smart copywriting and keyword placement will yield results. By far, the greatest advantage can be gained by writing smart copy that is extremely helpful and informative to the visitor. This might encourage other sites to link to you and your content. There are also many programs and methods to build link scores. Be very careful and do not violate Google’s advice on building link farms. There are good ways and very bad ways to do this and they both seem quite popular at the moment.
Conclusion:
A good website marketing strategy is now a combination of both PPC and SEO. You should have a plan to improve your site over time through SEO and linking to the point that you can view the purchase of PPC keywords as an additional traffic generation method. Based on your monthly PPC costs you can determine wether based on your PPC return on investment if it is indeed worth it to pursue SEO.
John Robarge
Professional SEO living and working in Koh Samui Thailand for the Hotel and
Travel industry. Frequent speaker at asian web marketing events.
Contact: john@hitfarmer.com
