Financial Advisor

Goals and Key Word Research

You want your web site to come up higher on the search engines, but for what terms do you want to rank?  You may find out very quickly that the terms you want to rank highly for are not the terms you need to rank highly on the search engines.  The reason for this is that your key words must relate to your search campaign goals.  A term may be highly relevant to your product or service, but have no correlation to the final objective you wish to obtain.  For this reason, it is important that at this point, you scrap any preconceived notion of the key words you think you want to rank for and first draft your search goals.

Define Your Goals:

The first thing to consider when establishing your goals is to decide what the specific objectives of your campaign are.  That is, what do you consider to be a conversion?  A conversion is the desired result of someone coming to your web site.  In very few cases, is simply having someone click on a link in Google and come to your home page a desired result, rather it is means to a desired end.  What you must decide is what is that end.

You may have more than one conversion in mind.  In many cases you have several secondary goals.  You need to concentrate on what is the central objective the secondary goals will eventually lead to?

For example, you may be in the financial industry and consider a conversion filling out a loan application.  The key is to identify what is your specific goal and how achieving that goal will benefit you or your organization.

One thing to keep in mind is the limitations of search. A conversion for SEO purposes should be something that can occur online.  The reason for this is that you will have a hard time tracking the success of your campaign with any analytics tool.  Those more elaborate conversions may be something you consider an over riding Marketing or Sales Goal.  A prime example of this over riding goal might be a finance company whose goal is to receive an online application for a loan.  The actual reviewing of the loan, drafting security agreement and financial statement and finally having the applicant receive his or her funds is outside the scope of a web conversion.  Once you have firmly established your goals you can only then move on to consider what key words will likely drive traffic to achieve those goals.

Key word research:

The next task in optimizing your web site is to determine the key words that correspond to your campaign goals.  These are the words, when entered into a search engine that should bring your web listing up on one of the first few result pages.

Often, a web site owner might think they know what key word, or key word phrase, that a potential user might search, to find your web site.  However, many of the terms, even highly relevant to the topic of the web site and even the campaign conversion goals are not searched frequently.  It is important to not only ascertain what terms are relevant to a search for the company’s web site, but also how many times a month are the terms searched, thereby ensuring the most potential traffic to the web site from the search engine campaign.  Moreover, the key words must be terms that relate to the specific goals and not just the overall topic of the web site.

Once the key words for the search campaign are set, it is important to create an initial report on where your web site stands prior to making any changes on or off the web site.  It is important to track the clicks from the search engines and determine which key words are bringing the most traffic.  This is important to monitor from both an organic and a pay-per-click campaign.  If a word is ranking highly but not converting, or if a word is generating traffic but not converting, it may be time to change your key words or reallocate the key words which are converting better to the pages with terms which are not.

Tracking will need to come from a variety of sources.  You should track two unique aspects of the key word performance.  First, you must track user behavior.  Second, you must track search engine rankings.  To measure user behavior you will want to see what are the terms being clicked on to bring traffic to your site.  You then want to temper that information with a position report.  This will tell where terms users are clicking on are coming from.

What is the gist of all of this?  As important as it is to pick highly relevant key words, it is even more important to pick the terms that achieve your conversion goals.

About the Author

This Article was written by Mike Goldstein. Mike is the SEO Manager at Rock Coast Media, a Boston-Area search engine marketing firm that provides results-driven custom search marketing solutions.

Goals and Key Word Research by Mike Goldstein