Finding the good keywords

[TomB]

thats,

some of those tatoos are really nice.

I'm just trying to get more traffic for one of my clients on-line stores, and wondered what sales conversions are like?

T

[ScottJ]

Depends on the quality of the traffic and why they arrive, if people are arriving looking for images which a lot of my traffic is then it's harder to sell services like translations and subscriptions, also there are a huge amount of things you can do on site to improve conversion rates so there are no defining numbers imo it's very much trial and error.

You could target a very specific keyword that is easy to rank for and get 100 visitors and 5 sales. 1:20

You can target less specific keywords that are higher in traffic volume that is less relevant and harder to rank for and get 10,000 visitors and 25 sales. 1:400

[TFGtv.com]

Originally Posted by Snapper

I think SEO is akin to voodoo.

Let's see, 1/2lb candle wax, some pins, pack of Tarot cards, some joss sticks...

Yup!

I have to agree. Maybe it's just the nature of my 'product' being as it is an essentially localised service. We've had the W.O.M. discussion before of course, and SEO obviously works, and works well in many situations.

But I wonder about the effect of the search engines themselves.... Clients come to me mainly through W.O.M. although I occasionally DO run little marketing... well campaigns is too elaborate a word but..... Often the feedback I'm getting is that folk have looked for my kind of service, and found themselves bamboozled by the mostly unsuitable results returned by the search engines...

I typed "video production scotland" into google yesterday.... My site was 5th on the list. Today..Nowhere to be seen. By tomorrow or the next day who knows?...

Although there was some in the past there's been no SEO effort made on my current site. But I'm honestly wondering should I bother since the search engines seem to be like a big bubbling pot of soup where you can never be quite sure if what's rising to the top is a chunk of meat or just some random gristle...

[Brian McIntosh]

I've never been even near first page on Google but I must agree with you Matt. I've spoke to people who say the same thing as you. One day on page one then down to page two with no changes being made. Is it down to other sites maximising their sites and pushing other sites down the list? I tell you, voodoo has something to do with it somewhere.

[ScottJ]

The more people that think it's voodoo and ignore it the better for others

Consistency can be achieved but you have to work at it, as with anything, so if left alone it would be quite normal to see your site bop about a fair bit.

[RedEvo]

Scott is that 8 million unique visitors or 8 million hits?

d

[RedEvo]

Originally Posted by barryhynd

Keywords is an area I really struggle with. Can any body give me a process for checking and idnetifying good ones. I know there's things like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery but i'd love to see some sort of excel approach to identifying them and then funnelling it until you get to the best 20-30.

Tools such as WT and KWD show you search volumes. Without that it's a bit tricky and not something you can fiddle in Excel.

d

[ScottJ]

8.7 million visitors, 65,098,719 pageviews, that actually works out as just over 7 million absolute unique visitors according to Google analytics.



To get back on topic about keywords, just for the stat lovers I dug out the keyword stats which really shows the long tail to effect over a year.

Search sent 6,875,545 total visits via 634,243 keywords

[TFGtv.com]

Originally Posted by ScottJ

The more people that think it's voodoo and ignore it the better for others

Consistency can be achieved but you have to work at it, as with anything, so if left alone it would be quite normal to see your site bop about a fair bit.

Quite so... But part of my point was from a user's perspective... The feedback MY customers are giving me is that they are A) Finding the search engines LESS useful than they were and B) As a result less convinced of the usefulness of the web, or at least the search engines as a 'high street'.....

Another example; Last week I found myself looking for bits for my old car...

From google "porsche spares uk" returned just TWO sites actually selling spare parts; The rest were 'grey importers' selling or leasing cars, viagra sellers and rolex replicas. I gave up and started trawling through the discussion boards to find links buried in posts and directories....

The more people think it's Voodoo the more people will think it's snake-oil... So people buy snake oil; fair enough. But it's rather less credible than it was in Barnum's day..

Now; no-one is suggesting SEO doesn't work; but to what end does it work? And it really the holy grail of marketing we would be lead to believe it is? Barry's original post was on finding the 'good' keywords.... And that leads to the question of what ARE the good keywords?... I pointed out that yesterday my site was at No 5 when I searched a fairly common string on Google yesterday. Today it's gone tomorrow it could well be back...

Now, frankly, I'm past caring where it is on Google; it doesn't seem to affect business. Which is why so far I haven't even got 'round to sticking any keywords into my pages. But I know people who DO care, HAVE put the effort in and aren't really any better off than me... As far as I can see there seems to be some sort of mysterious game of 'cat and mouse' going on between the search engines and the search engine optomisers...

[ScottJ]

I'd say SEO is actually very straight forward, 95% of it is very basic and easy to undertsand, just not so easy today to implement so it's easy to stop or not see it through seeing as it is a continual process - some people would like to make you think it's harder than it is.

1/ Make sure your main keywords appear in you title tag & description tage and main page but do not be spammy and make sure each page on your site has unique content and title/description.
2/ Get backlinks from relative site which link to you with some of the main keywords in the link
3/ Get links from relative site that link to you 'in context' using your site name
4/ Make sure links are not just targetted at your homepage.

That is about it for the most part, if people are trying hard without success it is usually down to

1/ Poor quality content
2/ Poor quality inbound links
3/ Stopping SEO work

I remember 5 years ago when I was really looking into SEO and reading and testing that people were saying how they felt the results were less relative then, I think you will find that in return for what is a free service (Google) many average users are prepared to put up with some noise and for the most part get what they want.