What Is A Result In SEO Terms? Part 1 – Keywords

Fact: Too many people engage in SEO without a full understanding of what they can really expect from it and what constitutes a good result.

This blog series will focus on what constitutes a good result and how to plan for maximum return on investment. So let’s get started with Part 1: Keywords!

Everyone seems to understand that particular keywords will bring them business, but too often the keywords they choose to SEO are just guesses influenced by personal bias without applying any real assessment or understanding of SEO to them.

As an example, let’s look at a service. We’ll use “Asphalting”. Now it might seem that the natural keyword there is the service itself, but if you’ve read any of our other recent blogs (particularly our recent 5 part SEO series) then you’ll know that we like to push one all important idea into the minds of anyone delving into anything SEO: User Experience.

But unlike performing SEO, where you’d be thinking of the end user while trying to understand why Google demands what it does from you, when thinking about which keywords you should target you need to think about what type of end user the keyword you’re considering would attract.

Simply using the service you offer (Asphalting) is obviously going to get you in front of a lot of traffic, but who makes up that traffic? However safe it might be to bet that some of the traffic for it might be people looking for Asphalting companies, what sort of Asphalting are they looking for? Do you even offer the sort of Asphalting some of the people who come through to your site via that keyword are after?

And what if this person is on the other side of the country? There were no geographical indicators in the keyword, so it’s a distinct possibility. And all of this is only if the people searching the keyword aren’t just doing research on asphalting, wondering what it is, or any of the other possibilities involved in a non-buying keyword like this.

Simply put, traffic does not necessarily equal business. You can waste a lot of time on irrelevant traffic if you have chosen the wrong keywords. SEO is not like AdWords, you cannot login to a platform and filter out the traffic you don’t want with negative keywords so that you can target these broader ones. You have to fit all of the psychology and lead qualification into the keyword itself.

So although “Asphalting” might have huge traffic numbers, that doesn’t mean it will necessarily make a difference to your business. Trust the data on this one. A quick Google search on “conversions vs traffic” will show you that this is a long talked about topic with lots of numbers and studies to back up the idea.

So let’s take all of the above into account. We’ll take one sub category of a service you might offer, say “footpath repairs” and we’ll add a location to it, so “footpath repairs Melbourne”. You don’t need to be a genius to understand why anyone searching this keyword is far more likely to be looking to engage a company (probably soon) to repair footpaths. They’re also within your service area.

Now I’m willing to bet that this keyword has vastly less traffic than “Asphalting”, but which do you think is more likely to have a tangible monetary impact on your business?

I’ll leave you to have a think on that before we delve into the next part of the formula: Conversions.

Stay tuned!

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