Targeting keywords solely because they have a high search volume isn’t necessarily the best way to go about creating your keyword roadmap for on-site copy and inbound tactics. As selfish as we like to be with keyword targeting, it can’t exist as its own siloed research anymore.

At the end of the day, the goal is to provide value to the end user in a way that benefits both them and the brand. This extends far beyond simply targeting specific keywords — it needs to be baked into your whole online presence.

Assuming that you’re hitting the ground hard, making sure technical is in order and your brand is strong and sturdy, here are some ideas to get better insight into keyword groups and how customers view your brand.

Listen to Your Current Customers

Current customer interaction can be extremely telling in terms of how a specific segment refers to your product in “natural language.” A big mistake during the keyword research and content creation process is assuming that what the masses are searching for is actually what your future customer is searching for.

Your on-site content should reflect natural language mixed with more general terms. Whether you’re a product- or services-based company, take the time to pay attention to any of the following information that you may have available:

• Customer Testimonials  — This includes video, email or other mediums.
• Customer Phone Calls – This can be customer service based, upgrade based or general feedback calls.
• Customer Screening Calls – This applies to service providers that record screening calls for loans or other applications.

Using this information, try to determine the following:

• How are your customers referring to your product(s) and/or services(s)?
• Are there any specific word, service or product variations you’re hearing consistently?
• How do these words and phrases match up with those you initially identified as your “high volume” terms?

After you have a fairly solid idea of what language your customer base is using, you can use this to inform and modify your target keyword list. From there, you’ll want to take your analysis a step further by determining the value of those keywords, based on conversion data.

For example, let’s say you’re targeting “bad credit” or “poor credit” as keywords, and these terms generate a lot of traffic and leads. Consider this, however: if customers are converting off of those terms through your lead generation form, are they actually being approved? And once they are, are they actually good customers who pay their loans back on time?

This ties more into the customer life-cycle discussion, but can help you understand what keywords aren’t worth targeting for a multitude of reasons — including potentially impacting your bottom line in a negative way over time.

Multi-Location Businesses

As I mentioned in a previous post, targeting ad copy to specific locations with “location specific” keywords is helpful, even if those phrases don’t have the highest overall search volume. Incorporating “familiar” words based on location will help in the overall message of the copy.

Suggestion: Send out surveys (not too frequently) asking your customers specific questions that could reveal the ways in which different cities view your company. You’ll begin to understand subtle differences in how various locations react and respond to your product, which may impact how potential customers are querying and searching for products or services like yours.

Mind Meld – Analytics, SEMrush and WMT + [Insert tool here]

There’s great insight that can come from merging general keyword research (your wishlist) with phrases that are: A) sending your site traffic, B) actually ranking, and/or C) converting well (organic and paid, if applicable). Remember, just because you have a page ranking well for a particular keyword on your wishlist doesn’t mean it’s sending you traffic or converting.

Once you have all of your sources separated into pretty spreadsheets (so you won’t lose your mind), create an extra one that aggregates all the data so you can start seeing patterns with duplication, search volume, CTRs, rankings, conversions, etc.

If you start with a large data set that pulls from multiple tools (including the “soft” data you get from customer feedback, calls, discussions, etc.), you’ll be able to whittle that list down to a small group per page to target.

For example:

• Extract the top 50-100 phrases (non-branded) from tools that you’re using.
• Drop them into an excel sheet that has a column to identify the source.
• Use conditional formatting to identify and mark duplicates.
• Dive in and start finding answers to questions.

Start analyzing and ask yourself questions: Are keywords that rank well sending a lot of traffic, or minimal traffic? Are phrases that produce substantial traffic actually converting? Are there repeated long-tail queries that show opportunities for “clarification content” (informational content to answer frequent queried questions) or new keyword research?

Answering these questions can help in a number of ways. They can provide ideas for informational content to capture and convert more traffic. They can also help you to understand your weaknesses or areas where improvements need to be made (clearer CTAs, more concise messaging, etc).

Keyword Density vs. Natural Language

“I want xx percent density, make sure you’re repeating this particular keyword because it’s important to our business.”

How many times have you heard this from your superiors, or even a client that you’re working with? Plenty, I’m sure.

Here are the two main problems with this attitude:

1. This person is attempting to define the most important keyword to their business (and probably has no clue), and
2. This person is asking for a specific density and usage of said keyword.

This topic of keyword density still comes up, though it’s something that those of us in the industry know hasn’t mattered for quite some time. This can be a big education point for your upper management (or clients) if you’re working on copy and mapping out the keyword integration for on-site and off-site strategy. In general, you want to do the following:

• Use natural modifiers, synonyms and related phrases from your previous research. For example, the word “career” has many variations, as do the actual professions where words may be interchangeable. Mining SERPs with the “~” attached to your target keyword or phrase can help bring those to light.
• Integrate these phrases into your outreach campaigns, along with branded variations, to create a strong, cohesive web between your off-site and on-site signals.

Once you get over the obsession that drilling the same keyword(s) into the headings and body copy over and over again  is effective, you’ll be in a much better position to capture relevant search traffic.

Remember and repeat this phrase:

It’s not just about one keyword — it’s all about the relationship between thematically connected words.

Remember: You can never judge a keyword or phrase solely based on its numeric value — you must take into account all other factors, including how you’re optimizing on-site and what your off-site strategies and tactics are. You can find diamonds in the rough that are unique to your business and convert, which don’t require your only option being brute force in a vertical that may already be highly competitive and saturated. Your research should constantly evolve and be refined as data pours in. Get creative. There are keywords out there to mine.

Ratios of Informational Content

In previous articles, I’ve written about the importance of theming content – developing a strategy that truly plays to your customers’ search intent. But usually, very little of that is informational content. The average website has a ratio of 80/20 navigational or transactional content to informational content — the opposite of how people are searching. If you have a blog, the ratio usually doesn’t get much higher than 60/40, and even then, most of that content is either not keyword rich or it’s what we call “time-limited” content.

Types of Informational Content

There are two primary types of informational content: “time-limited” and “evergreen.” The former describes the category that most blog posts fall into: a summary of some industry event, a commentary on recent news, or an opinion piece that will be outdated in a few months. Evergreen content, on the other hand, will continue to be relevant for many years.

The most popular of the latter type is “how to” content; but, that content has unfortunately earned a bad reputation due to sites like ehow and wikianswers, where you are as likely to find content on how to tie a shoe (not particularly useful) as you are on how to tune a guitar (useful). If a how-to is useful, then by all means, you should write it and include it on your website.

If you’re having trouble determining what people in your industry are looking for, try using the “Discussions” feature in Google. To do this, search for a keyword, like [computers]. Then, click on the “More” drop-down menu and select “Discussions.”

The resulting page shows you a variety of queries and discussions related to your keyword. “What percentage of computers are gaming computers?” “Where can I buy a used computer?” “How can I connect multiple computers to the same Internet connection?”

These questions all make great fodder for evergreen content. You could collect some data and write a post about what kinds of computers people buy and what they are used for or a post on what to look for and be wary of when buying a used computer or a post that explains how to connect multiple computers through a single router.

As you can see by the examples above, evergreen informational content doesn’t necessarily have to be “how-to” in nature; it can be explanatory (the difference between x and y) or best practices (why x, y and z will continue to work), as long as each is based on a topic or concept that is likely to remain relevant for years to come.

While time-limited content tends to be more effective at gaining links and attention, evergreen content is generally (not always) more effective at gaining rankings for specific keywords. The key is to make sure either type of content is truly helpful to searchers and not just written for SEO.

When is Informational Content Useful?

To answer this question, consider what the searcher is looking for. For example, if a searcher is looking for “droid cases” and you sell batteries, then content related to “droid cases” is probably not going to be all that useful to either party. A searcher of “droid cases” is not going to find your website relevant if you don’t sell droid cases, even if you do provide great information about how to choose one.

But, if the searcher wants to know why his “phone won’t charge” (10k monthly searches and very low competition), then you could provide some detailed, helpful content about when it’s best to buy a new charger or how to tell when your battery may be past its prime. This type of content is directly geared toward producing a sale, but it does not have to be.

Another example: let’s say you have a corporate website and you are trying to attract investors. This is a very competitive, low search volume market. Obviously, you want to optimize for the brand keywords [xyz company investing] and such, but you also may want to provide information on the different types of investments as well, even if you don’t offer them.

For instance, [high yield investment] is a strong search term. If your company is focused on long-term investment, then this would be the exact opposite of what you do; so normally, you would not optimize for it. But, with such a limited volume for [low risk investing] and similarly relevant keywords, you should take the opportunity to try and capture these additional keywords. Here’s how:

Steps to writing informational content

Integrating Your Informational Content

Informational content is important, and you shouldn’t just throw it everywhere. Long-form content has its place, and you should consult with your designers and user experience team to determine where it fits best. (We’ll explore that more next month.)

For now, just know that you need to have the content as well integrated with your site as possible. Keep in mind, too, that evergreen content can be in a blog if that’s where it makes sense to put it, but it’s more likely to get search engine attention if it’s part of your main navigation, such as within an “information center” or “resources” section.

If you fill a few pages of your site with informational content, you’ll find that you will get a lot more traffic. The catch? You must accept that the purpose of this exercise is to get more eyeballs on your site (oops, I mean to provide a valuable service) and that the traffic may not convert well. Still, 1% conversion on 10,000 visitors is a lot more conversions than 5% conversion on 1,000 visitors.

I joked earlier that this is just an SEO play, but the truth is that all websites should have some element of informational content. There are several stages in the buying cycle, and information gathering is one of the most important. Don’t leave your information seekers out in the cold — or worse, at one of your competitors’ websites.

But, on the subject of website redesign, we’re leading several of our clients through this right now. As they’re all at various stages and have various requirements for the finished project, I thought it might be beneficial to write up a content strategy process you can use when you do redesign your website.

Hire The Right People

You need:

1. A Website Developer: one who is open to a variety of platforms and can discuss the pros and cons of each one with you.
2. A Designer: one who can make your vision a reality. Make sure you hire someone who can use search-engine-friendly methods (i.e., no Flash, etc.).
3. A Technical SEO: one to make sure you don’t lose any of your existing rankings or traffic with the relaunch, and that SEO principles are “baked in.”

Determine Your Content Strategy

You need to conceive and implement a great content strategy. The best way to design a site is around the content your users truly need and want, but that’s not always feasible. If you have a lot of good content already, it may be better to look at the assets you already have and try to fill in the blanks.

Start From Zero

Keyword research should be your first step. Refer back to this article for some more information on that. Categorize your keywords into intent-based categories and think about the content you’d need to write to fulfill the needs of each topic.

For example, for a weight-loss program, there are likely to be a lot of searches around how the program works. This includes keywords like [how does x work], but it also includes keywords like [do I have to exercise on x]?

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to check… ranking. Yes, I said it. Check to see how you are ranking on Google for your keyword categories. What pages are ranking? Has Google already identified pages on your site that are most relevant to a given topic? If so, you probably want to go ahead and assign the ranking keywords to those pages.

Map The Keywords

Look at what you have left. Are there content pages that need to be created? Is there existing content that would be a good match for the topic, maybe with a few slight changes in tone or focus? Map a single topic and keyword list to each page. No page should have more than 3-5 keywords, and they should all be tightly themed.

For example: [weight loss], [weight loss program], [losing weight], and [weight loss for women] could all be on one page, but you wouldn’t want [weight loss for women], [losing weight with exercise], [eating healthy], and [vitamin supplements] all on one page.

Similarly, all the keywords you choose for a page should be focused on the same stage of the buying cycle. The keywords above were all centered around information gathering. You wouldn’t want to suddenly throw a keyword like [buy food for weight loss] into the mix. It’s the wrong focus for an informational page.

Architect The Site

This is the point at which you involve the developer and the designer. Now that you know what the focus of the pages is going to be, you can begin to break them apart into sections and subsections.

Many developers won’t take on a project until you can tell them how many pages you’ll need, anyway (and this is the wrong way to price projects like this, in my opinion). The more insight you have into what your finished architecture needs to be, the more helpful the designer and developer can be.

Write The Content & The Tags

Now, you have tightly focused keywords around well-themed copy. While the designer is creating the user experience, and the developer is coding the pages, write the copy.

Use the keywords in the heading and the content without overdoing it, and then write tags that reflect the page, as well. Remember, although a description tag has no direct impact on ranking, it can certainly increase click-through rate if it’s written well.

Check Back With The Technical SEO

Before you even think about launching, be sure to check back in again with the technical SEO to make sure your site adheres to all the required best practices, that you have a redirect table properly set up, etc. Allow them to QA and do all the geeky things we do.

So now, you have a simplified approach to developing content for a new site. As you’ve probably already guessed, you can use this strategy for any content you’re developing. Just remember to focus on the keywords, and you’ll be golden.

Image credit to ShutterStock

You may see a drop in rankings or traffic and immediately panic. Have I been Panda-slapped? Even now, as we look at the two year anniversary of Google’s Panda Update, the likelihood is that you have not. Rankings and traffic fluctuate for many reasons, most of which are not related to penalties from search engines.

But, how can you tell? Instead of watching rankings overall, watch categories of keywords. If you separate your keyword categories by topic, you can more easily spot trends that have to do with a particular content area of your site. Typically, if there is a problem, it’s going to start there.

To evaluate symptoms of a bigger issue, I’ve created this handy protocol to get you started:

Help, My Rankings Dropped!

1. Have they really dropped?

• Do you see a corresponding decrease in traffic?
  • If yes, wait two days and check again, they may come right back up. Rankings and traffic bobble all the time.
  • If no, there’s probably not anything to worry about. Recheck in a week or so.

Keep in mind, there’s dozens of reasons a report may not be accurate. If analytics doesn’t show a corresponding decrease in organic traffic, there’s probably no problem.

2.  Ok, I’ve double checked and they really did drop. My analytics show a decrease, too.

• Don’t panic!
• Look at how the drops are correlated. Are they all from one group of keywords? Are they associated with certain pages of the website?

3.  If they’re all from a particular category of keywords, read on. If not, skip to Step 4.

• Check the sites that are ranking for these keywords. Are there new players? Has someone shot to the top that wasn’t there before? If so, investigate what they are doing differently. Is the content fresher, better optimized, more shared in social media? It may be that you just need to keep up with the Joneses.
• If no one has shot to the top lately, check to make sure no one has made any major changes to the site. It could be a technical issue.
• Still no luck? Sorry, you’ll have to hire an SEO to do a deeper analysis.

4.  If they aren’t from a particular category of keywords, but are from the same pages or section of the site, this could be a problem.

• Check the pages that used to rank/have traffic. Are they still live? Any major changes to them lately?
• Evaluate the content with an open mind. Is it really quality content? Or do you have duplication or poor quality? You can find a complete checklist here.
• Have any of these pages been duplicated elsewhere? Take a snippet of unique text from the page and search it in Google with quotes to see if someone’s been copying your content.
• Any technical issues, such as an accidental noindex or canonical tag?

5.  If you identify any of the above (except tech issues), you could be looking at the first stages of a Panda penalty.

You need to clean up this content asap, as the trend you are seeing could be an early warning sign that you could be impacted by Panda.

Truths & Myths About Panda

• Panda is an algorithm, not a manual penalty. It is only refreshed periodically. If you see early warning signs like the ones described above, you usually have plenty of time to clean up the content before the next Panda refresh.
• Panda, when applied, typically affects an entire domain or subdomain. You will likely see a significant drop in organic traffic as a result.
• It is still possible to maintain some rankings (especially in the 30s-40s and up) when hit by Panda. You probably won’t disappear completely, although it may feel like you did.
• There are usually early warning signs that you’re about to be hit, unless what you’re doing is blatantly spamming and it triggers a manual penalty.
• Most sites will never be affected by Panda.
• Panda is not only about duplication, although that is one of the most common forms of it. It’s also about poorly written or unsubstantial content.
• Duplication of a few pages, or a small percentage of poorly written content is unlikely to trigger Panda. The ratio usually needs to be pretty high.

So now you’re empowered to fight the Pandas in the room. The best advice I can give you is to remember that you are fighting a computer. Computers do make mistakes, but they are rare.

If you’ve been hit by an algorithmic update, you probably took short cuts that you shouldn’t have taken. Also keep in mind that no one but Google knows for sure how this all works. Although my opinions are based on experience, there are always aberrations and dissenters. Feel free to debate in the comments.

1.  Wikipedia

How many times have you found a promising keyword only to discover a Wikipedia page ranking first in Google? The prospect of having to outrank Wikipedia used to be daunting, but after discovering this technique, it’s more of a bittersweet occurrence.

If you wanted to rank organically for the expensive keyword [structured settlement], you may notice the following Wikipedia page ranking first in Google for the keyword:

 This tool will allow you to find the traffic volume for any Wikipedia page over the last 90 days. The resulting data can help you determine, whether it is worth the effort, to try and outrank the Wikipedia page.

2.  Government Website Keyword Data

If it’s not a Wikipedia page that’s outranking me, it’s invariably a government website. As a tax payer, you effectively own a share in your government’s websites. Governments are coming under more pressure to improve transparency and, as a result, are making vast amounts of data available to the public.

Would you not be interested in knowing the keywords, referring sites, and most popular pages of a website that you help to fund?

The UK government already shares the data for one of the UK’s most popular website, DirectGov:

• Keywords
• Referring Sites
• Most Popular Pages

It’s quite interesting to sneak a peek behind the curtain and see the keywords which this popular website is ranking for, but on a more practical level, the data can be used for:

1. Targeting keywords in your niche
2. Checking the accuracy of keyword tools
3. Creating content or a mini site based on the most popular pages
4. Using the referral data for link building opportunities

If a government is not publicly sharing data for a particular website, you may be able to use Freedom of Information legislation to request it. It usually involves just sending an email to the site administrator. I have used Freedom of Information legislation to request keyword and referral data from the following UK websites:

• Justice.gov.uk
• Office of National Statistics 
• Department of Work and Pensions
• Home Office
• Inland Revenue
• Department of Transport

The resulting information contained a goldmine of keyword data for the legal, finance and auto niches.

3.  Most Popular Posts Of [Insert Year]

At the end of the year, many websites, including Search Engine Land, highlight their most popular posts. To find posts that have proved popular in your niche, you can use Google and a query such as:

[your niche]+most popular posts of 2012+traffic

If you were in the legal niche and looking for new keyword and content ideas, you could use a query such as:

If you click on the highlighted post, the author mentions that during the year, they wrote 50 articles and had over 100,000 visitors. Using the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule), we can estimate that the 10 articles listed received around 80,000 visitors.

If I were working as an SEO for a law firm, I would see this as a great opportunity to create some ‘how to’ content on topics such as:

1. How to look up criminal records
2. How to conduct a background check
3. How much does it cost to find a person

You could also do back link analysis to see which of these posts received links and then perform outreach to the sites that linked to your competitor after you have created even better content.

4.  [Keyword] + 2013

Google’s Keyword tool only provides historical keyword data. It does not account for what people will be searching for in the future.

You can pre-empt which keywords will be popular in the forthcoming year by using your Google analytics data from the previous year. By searching for [2012], it is possible to find year-specific keywords, which you can target for the coming year before these search terms are reflected in the keyword tool:

This will give you a head start on the competition, allowing you to be one of the first sites to have content and links for these soon-to-be popular keywords. Your content will also have more chance of acquiring links, as people who are searching for your time-relevant content, will be more likely to reference it.

If your site did not rank for any year-specific keywords, an alternative method would be to use your AdWords data or target your most popular keywords adding the [year] parameter. For example, if one of your popular keywords was [tax return], you could target [tax return 2014].

Tip: I have used the above technique, together with buying the exact match domain for the keyword, such as [keyword2014.com], to create some very high traffic mini sites.

The tools and techniques listed above are not a replacement for other keyword tools. They help to give a clearer picture and a head start on your competition. Let me know about any creative keyword tools or hacks you use in the comments.

In this article, I’ll look at a website that was submitted for review from a “Keywords and Content” focus. The site is Restoration Parts Source (RPS), an e-commerce website supplying restoration car parts and accessories for new, vintage and classic U.S. makes and models.

1.  Don’t Focus Only On Broad Keywords

In his submission, Michael, RPS’s Web consultant, listed some keywords that are important to them, such as [classic car parts] and [restoration car parts].

While you do want to improve search results for broad keywords like these if you can, the competition can be very high. Plus, you’ll often find the actual business from broad keywords may not be as significant as you expect.

In addition to traffic from broad keywords, we typically see traffic and sales generated from more specific keywords such as [ford mustang parts] that typically return category pages of an e-commerce site in the search results, as well as from searches on specific products themselves such as [Headliner for 1963 Falcon Hardtop], which typically return the product pages in the search results. In fact, for many e-commerce sites, it’s the more specific keywords that are responsible for the majority of the sales.

Ideally, you’ll want to do keyword research for each of the categories and many of the specific products. Test as many of these keywords as possible using a PPC campaign with conversion tracking.

After some time, using site analytics such as Google Analytics, you can get a list of the keywords generating sales from both PPC and organic search. If you focus on improving search results for those keywords, you should increase sales. See Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization for more information on this.

2.  Do Keyword Research For Product Categories & Specific Products

Use a keyword research tool such as the Google AdWords keyword tool to see what people are searching on within your territory for your product categories and specific products. For most e-commerce sites, this will take a fair amount of time; so, start with the important products.

If possible, test the keywords that appear to be relevant in a PPC campaign. Then use the results of the keyword research or the PPC campaign to improve your organic search results. Start with the basics, the HTML Page Titles and the content on the pages.

For example, on the RPS site, the HTML Page Title for the Ford category is simply [Ford Parts]. Not only is this not very enticing when viewed in search results, it is likely too broad. The HTML Page title should help searchers scanning the search results understand what they can expect if they click through to the page. Try to create an enticing message and ideally include one or two important keywords.

If RPS determines that [Ford Restoration Parts] is an important keyword phrase, for example, they might create a more enticing HTML Page Title based on their value statement (which is unclear on the RPS site; see more about this below), and/or based on one or more key features/benefits such as the following (with or without the company name appended at the end):

Discounted Ford Restoration Parts Shipped The Same Day

For more information, see 12 Steps To Optimize A Webpage For Organic Keywords.

3.  Add Unique Content On Category Pages To Improve Search Results

Armed with your keyword research and/or results from PPC, add some overview text to your category pages. Yes, on category pages, you don’t want to push your items down too far, but just a couple of sentences can make a difference in search results.

This also gives you a chance to present a sales message to your human visitors, many of whom will land directly on these pages from search results without seeing any messages you may have on your home page.

Here’s an example. Assume that from the results of your PPC testing, you learn that [ford mustang restoration parts] is an important keyword. Do a search on that keyword.

Below is the top organic result I got for a Google search on [ford mustang restoration parts]. Notice in the screen shot below, the reasonably enticing description Google generated for a top ranked listing.

It includes some of the words and phrases searched for in bold such as [Ford Mustang parts], [restoration] and even [restore], which Google knows is a variation of the word “restoration.”

Search description Google generated from text on a page

The description above was created by Google directly from the text on the page (see screen shot below).

Description above was created by Google directly from the text on the page (Click to Enlarge)

You can improve your search results, both rankings and click-throughs, by developing similar messages for your category pages that include one or two of the most important keyword phrases for the category. Very often, the search engines will create a description for the search results from the text on the page around occurrences of the keyword the person searched for.

Plus, having the keyword one or more times on the page should help your rankings (don’t stuff it!). You should also create a similarly enticing Meta Description Tag in case the search engine creates a description from it rather than creating a description from the text on the page.

RPS has an issue on some of their category pages which have little category-related text. Some categories have no items at all (this site review is about Keywords and Content, not a User Experience Audit, but I think RPS needs to rethink its navigation system so issues like this do not occur). Hopefully, their site search is helping people find the items they are looking for.

4.  Add Unique Content On Product Pages

Adding your own content to product pages, such as unique product descriptions, your own commentary and helpful messages, user reviews, videos and images will likely help improve search results by making your product pages unique. Plus, including additional content on product pages may get your pages returned in more search results because of the additional text.

Finally, and probably most importantly, your content can help increase sales by helping your shoppers make decisions on what to buy and make them feel more comfortable about buying from you.

Use your keyword research and/or the results from your PPC testing initially for the basics, such as creating an enticing HTML Page Title, ideally including one or two important keywords for the product. Also, take the time to write enticing Meta Description tags for your items or, at least, the most important ones.

Include at least some product description text on the product page (see below about using descriptions provided by your vendors). Keep the important product-specific keywords in mind while writing content for the page, but write for your human visitors, not the search engines.

Many of RPS’s product pages are very sparse on product descriptions such as this Headliner for a 1963 – 65 Falcon Hardtop. There’s just a short description and a product number.

Take a look at the search listing for the top ranking site when I searched on [Headliner 1963 Falcon Hardtop]. As with the category page example above, Google created an enticing search description directly from the product description on the page.

Below is the product description for the Dearborn Classics product page that was returned in the search results above.

Product description for Dearborn Classics product page returned in search results above. Click to Enlarge

Using more complete product descriptions such as the above should not only help RPS do better in the search results, it should help improve conversions to sales by providing a stronger, more complete product sales message to their shoppers.

However, it’s important to point out that the product description above used by Dearborn Classics is not unique. I searched on some of it and found the same text being used by many websites. This text is likely being provided by the supplier of these headliners. This is typical of many e-commerce sites that sell products manufactured by others. When the content on your product pages is predominantly the descriptions provided by your suppliers, you’ll be directly competing for rankings with all the other pages that include the same text.

So, when possible, rewrite the description or include a significant amount of your own unique content on the page such as additional product information, your own commentary, additional product images and/or videos, user reviews, etc., (see the next section for more about this).

Automated HTML Page Titles and Meta Description Tags

You won’t be able to write custom HTML Page Titles and Meta description tags for all the items of an e-commerce site that contains hundreds or thousands of items. It’s ideal to use an e-commerce system that creates decent tags using the product headline.

For example, one that creates tags for the HTML Page Title (along with possibly a tag line for the site or the category), while using the first part of the product description on the page for the Meta Description Tag, both of which can be manually overwritten.

5.  Give Your E-commerce Site Personality & Build Trust

As I went around the RPS site as a typical shopper, I learned very little about the company and the folks at RPS. When people shop online, they need to feel comfortable before they’ll buy from a company they know little or nothing about.

You can make people feel more comfortable about buying from you by at least employing some basics such as: a professional looking, user-friendly site; a meaningful value statement; a great guaranty and return policy; trust builders like well-known e-commerce security and process badges and seals; user reviews and testimonials, etc.

Make sure these elements are obvious as people shop by putting them, if not on every page, at least prominently one or more pages during the typical buying path (category page to product page to cart, etc.).

You can go much further than the basics and show what sets you apart from the competition while personalizing the site by including: mentions of one or more key personnel; helpful articles and videos; buyers guides; your own commentary about product categories and specific products; additional product information; videos and images, etc.

You could improve conversion rates and improve your search results at the same time by adding unique content to your site, allowing you to reach more searchers. You’ll also likely reach more searchers who are in the early stages of information gathering for a new purchase, giving you the opportunity to influence what they buy and retain them until they are ready to make a purchase.

You can learn more about this in from my earlier blog post, how to how increase e-commerce conversions 2-4x and improve search marketing results by helping shoppers decide what to buy.

6.  Increase Page Strength To Compete With Top Ranked Sites

When Michael submitted the site for review, he mentioned how eBay is often one of the top ranking sites for many of RPS’s products. It can be difficult to beat eBay because of their link popularity (page strength, etc.), but you can, in many cases.

In my searches for some of the products RPS carries, other resellers similar to RPS often ranked higher than eBay. Plus, you really don’t have to rank higher than eBay. Getting to the top few positions should give you your fair share of searchers as many people do look at a few results. And, many people may be looking for a supplier directly and not want shop via eBay.

RPS should be able to increase its business from both search results and other referral sites by focusing on improving their link popularity and social media engagement.

Take a look at some of the ideas that can be employed by e-commerce sites in the following articles to help improve link popularity and social engagement.

When pursuing an online marketing campaign, whether it be SEO, PPC, social media or link building, keyword research helps you understand your potential audience. And, understanding your audience is key to developing smart and effective usability practices on your website.

Using a variety of keyword research tools that are available online, you can gather some very important intelligence about how to reach your key customers. This, in turn, will help you create a website that improves your on-site customer engagement, visitor satisfaction and total site conversion rates.

When building a better website for your visitors, there are four things you need to know that keyword research will help you better understand.

Customer Terminology

One of the most important pieces of intelligence you can find with keyword research is the terminology your customers are using when looking for the products or services you offer.

Of course, most business people already know the “correct” terminology, as they are smack dab in the middle of their own industry. And if you believe that one, I’ll sell you the merchandising rights to the Star Wars franchise!

The truth is that those of us in any industry know our terminology. What we don’t always understand is how the customer talks about what we do, or, more specifically, how they search to find us.

Some might search for proper names, others might search for results or outcomes, while still others might search in descriptive terms. All these variables are in play because different people have different knowledge levels and think differently about what it is they need.

To give you a quick example from my own industry, many people refer to what we do as [SEO] or [search engine optimization]. Others call it [website marketing], [internet marketing], or even [inbound marketing]. Yet still, many people searching for what we offer are looking for [search engine rankings] or [website promotion].

All those terms can pretty much be used interchangeably. Those of us in the industry might use them with a bit more nuance, but the reality is, there isn’t a whole lot of daylight between them to the average searcher. We might just call it SEM.

But without looking at this smorgasbord of term variations, we might be missing out on a significant customer base if we don’t speak in their terms rather than our own.

Using Google’s keyword tool, a search for [website marketing] minus [marketing] produces different ways people refer to the same general service.

However, car dealers would be wise to dig into their audience’s terminology a bit. If they did, they’d find that a vast majority of searchers use the term [used cars].

Shocker.

In fact, [used cars] is searched approximately 1,000,000 times per month. Pre-owned cars is a good addition to the overall customer acquisition strategy; however, unless dealers go after [used cars], they are leaving hundreds of thousands of potential customers in the proverbial dust. Even if only 0.1% of those searches turned into a customer, that’s 1000 cars per month left sitting on the lot!

Understanding your customer’s terminology helps you write content that speaks the language that not only has meaning for them, but ensures that your content is immediately relevant to how they think.

Yes, the audience may put 2 and 2 together and realize that a pre-owned car is also a used car, but not everyone will. Don’t make your visitors connect the dots. Do it for them.

Customer Desires

Keyword research gives you insight on what your customers desire. This information can help you establish navigational elements, informational call-outs and calls to action that help each visitor get the information they need more quickly.

All good keyword research tools will give you a search volume number. Now these numbers won’t be perfectly accurate, but they will give you a good base of reference for comparing one keyword against the next. As you dig into your product or service categories, you begin to see variations on how searches are made.

For a site that sells kids ski and snow gear, your keyword research would show you that thousands search for [kids ski jackets] while only hundreds search for [kids snowboard jackets].

Both may be great keywords, but by sheer search volume alone, you can see there is far greater consumer desire for ski jackets over snowboard jackets.

Does that matter to your customer? It might. If you only targeted [snowboard] terms you are, again, missing out on a big chunk of your audience.

Let’s look at another example. Say you make or print ID badges. Keyword research will tell you what kinds of badges people are seeking most. Here you’ll find that [photo] is the most searched qualifier for [id badge], followed by [employee], [company], [custom] and [security].

Assuming conversion rates are the same for all these keywords, this information alone can help you decide how best to tailor your business to get the most profit possible. But beyond that, suppose you were just thinking about your product in terms of security badges. Those might have photos, and they typically are for employees of companies; but until now, you were just focused on the term [security].

Now, with your keyword research in hand, you see that you might want to adjust your content strategy to be optimized for some of these other qualifiers as well, giving more customers the information that is most relevant in making their purchasing decisions.

Competitive Keywords

A nice piece of data you can get from your keyword research is the competitive nature of any particular keyword. This is helpful when deciding which keywords you can expect to be successful at achieving top rankings for and in what amount of time.

If you don’t quite understand the competitive nature of the keywords you are targeting, there is a good chance you’ll wind up frustrated when you don’t get results as early as you had expected. That’s because your expectations weren’t rooted in the reality of the competitive landscape.

Competition ratings are just one factor in determining if a keyword is viable for your optimization campaign.

Truth be told, some keywords are very difficult to rank for because they have a lot of competition. But it’s not just the number of competitors, it’s also the strength of the competitors that matters as well.

The stronger, more authoritative and rooted your competition is for any given keyword phrase, the more difficulty you’ll have breaking through into top search engine positions. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means you may need more time and money to get it done.

When you find good keywords that are extremely competitive, sometimes it’s best to cede that ground for the time being and focus on something more attainable. The benefit of this strategy is that you can start to get top rankings and traffic more quickly, while building up your own authority in the eyes of the search engines. Some traffic now is better than no traffic for a long, long time.

Targeting the low-hanging fruit helps you build up your credibility and get the sales you need. As you grow, you become more competitive and can slowly begin to go after the keywords that are more and more difficult to achieve, but bring greater rewards once you are ranking for them.

This strategy also gives you the opportunity to test various on-page sales elements, terminology and designs to see which produces the greater return. Failed tests on this scale will produce less of a loss, and successful tests will give you more headway as you gain rankings for the more competitive terms.

User Questions

Another great thing about keyword research is finding out all sorts of questions that people are asking. This gives you plenty of fodder for creating site and social content that provides answers your customers need and finding ways to get your visitors to the content they want.

Filtering includes words such as how,when what, where and why can help you find questions that you can answer to drive traffic to your site.

Answering common searcher questions, in whatever forum, can really help you set yourself apart as an authority. Yes, this is the very same authority needed to get rankings on difficult and competitive keywords!

At the same time, providing answers to commonly asked questions can drive traffic for those searching for such answers.

While these may not be direct customers, you are creating a branding effect. Today’s information gatherer very well may be tomorrow’s customer. And who do you think they’ll go to when it’s time to buy? That’s right, the very site that provided them answers to the questions that have helped them make purchasing decisions.

These questions can also help you streamline your internal sales processes, decide what content is valuable, and what’s going to help you ward off unnecessary customers service phone calls. All of these can be pretty important time and money savers.

Keyword research is an important first step in any online or offline marketing campaign. It helps you build a website that engages customers and moves them through the conversion process armed with the information they need to make a smart purchase. The insight keyword research gives you can help you build a website that puts you more in touch with your audience than you would have otherwise been.

Image Credit

Jenny Halasz (JH): What do you think are the most important issues facing how we think about keywords?

Andrew Goodman (AG): Evolution is what we feel most comfortable with, and we are hoping that we can just continue to react to different consumer search patterns. People are getting more savvy about how they search. They know to enter a geo-modifier… people are giving us more intent than we used to get.

But that’s beginning to change as Google puts more and more things into a black box, and tries to determine intent before the keyword is even used. People need to be on the lookout for this, and recognize that the tradeoff of convenience may be the loss of pieces of micro data they’re used to getting.

Matt Van Wagner (MV): Well, it’s interesting, and over the last 10 years, people have been trained on how to use search engines more effectively.

For me, the most interesting thing is that something that should be stable, which is the lexicon, what keywords really are, has been stable for a particular period of time… Google, within the last year, they changed the protocols – started to do some monkeying around inside the black box – in a way that’s incredibly disruptive to the nuances of search query distinction.

To Andrew’s point, Google does want to continue to make things easier, but profitability is at the edge of differentiation between companies… Google is not omniscient so that they know your company’s competitive advantages and what works and what doesn’t as it relates to the way that you communicate out to your potential customers. I find it really odd that after so many years they would have fundamentally changed so many things.

In my mind, clarity in search keywords should be better than it was 10 years ago… but, the recent changes to match types and reporting have caused so much disruption to our own accounts that we’ve basically had to retool almost every account that we have.

AG: At an even higher level of abstraction, Google’s found themselves in a place of fiduciary responsibility. To some extent, they have implied a level of stability [that many businesses have invested in]. I was reading about car dealers who are suing manufacturers for doing things like dumping rental fleet cheaply. So of course, we can’t sue Google for changing the rules, but people do have a moral economy, certain built-up expectations that react negatively to disruption.

MV: The problem is that there are millions and millions of us, with very little bargaining power, and Google basically controls a good part of the economic engine that drives the world. Everyone was hoping that Microsoft would give them some competition, but they’re just not there yet. I mean, a car dealer who is upset with a manufacturer can just say goodbye and go off and carry a different line of cars.

JH: We don’t have that luxury.

MV: Well, go do print, go do TV. [laughs]

AG: Yeah, go do above urinal advertising. [all laughing] But Google is going to have a deal with the urinal people soon…

[Conversation digresses into jokes about Google’s “did you mean” at the urinal.]

JH: What do you think about the expansion of the exact match type and the option to opt-out? Google’s history has always been that you can opt out of something for a little while, but eventually you won’t be able to opt out anymore.

AG: I would argue that Google’s history always was a lot of opt-outs compared to everyone else (Yahoo, Overture)…

MV: Well, speaking of opt-outs, there was the whole brouhaha with the ad rotation thing. Everybody whined loudly and long about that, and Google reluctantly put that back in… even though it’s [not that great].

AG: Do not optimize. Have worse ads run indefinitely.

JH: I won’t quote you on that.

AG: I probably wrote that already. It’s out there, it’s public.

MV: I think they changed that, right?

AG: ‘Rotate indefinitely and do not optimize.’

MV: But also, that’s a “not recommended” thing.

AG: Is that a Zagat recommendation? What does ‘recommending’ even mean?

[Conversation digresses into jokes about who recommends what.]

MV: The best ad is not the same thing as the best ad group. And the best click-through-rate isn’t the same thing as the most profitable ad or ad group. Although they’ve tried with analytics and everything, they haven’t gotten to the point of being able to optimize every company in America. And they can’t do that because that would be completely anticompetitive.

JH: Leaving Google for a minute, I assume you both run campaigns on MSN?

MV: What’s MSN?

AG: Oh, right, isn’t it called Bing Ads now?

JH: Old habits die hard.

MV: Oh, we do it all the time. I had just trained everyone in my office to call it adCenter.

[Conversation digresses into discussion of trademarks…]

JH: Ok, so what is your impression of ads on Bing, and do you think they will continue to compete in the space?

MV: Yes, absolutely, they will continue to compete. Bing is all in. There are some questions about Yahoo, with the introduction of Marissa Mayer, whether that will help solidify the relationship, help things like display advertising get directly into Bing.

The contextual and display and other groups are so disparate, it’s like when you advertise in different countries; and, you have to make a contract with each country. What’s really cool about what’s going on with Microsoft right now is that they’re going to full synchronization with Adwords. They’re definitely trying to keep up with Google, but Google keeps changing things.

AG: Synchronization… is really what everyone wants. Ninety percent market share for paid clicks for Google is really what we’re dealing with here, so people are really focused on optimizing everything very detailed in their Google account. So, to have a separate setup in Bing is… people give up.

So this would be a lot of money to Microsoft’s bottom line if they can bring everyone on board [with synchronization]. A lot of people are sort of frustrated with it.

MV: I think they’ve settled out some should we or shouldn’t we issues and… they have a lot of things they feel will give them the ability to compete and outcompete Google on a lot of things. But the very first thing is they’ve got to get enough revenue pushing through there to make it a profitable division.

AG: I think the big difference beyond that is that it’s mainly a US success story as far as market share [for Bing] goes.

JH: Both of you mentioned in your presentation that segmentation of platforms and channels are impacting the type of data we’re getting from our tools. Do you think that’s likely to continue? Do marketers need to be thinking about advertising in all those different channels?

AG: There’s all this granularity of how people are searching, and… I think the question is, can we effectively segment our data and respond to it vs. should we be segmenting our strategies?

There’s a real tradeoff between aggregating for useful convenient narratives and analysis that are easily actionable vs. this infinite splintering… chopping data up into pieces that won’t be statistically significant, and the novice will certainly see things that don’t perform in smaller and smaller buckets and call them non-performers even though they’re just random holes and noise in the data.

MV: One of the things people are running into is cross-device attribution, and of course, they want to solve it. I don’t think it’s a solvable problem. But you can model out the data and [make inferences]. Until… you have an embedded chip in you, we are going to have to be living with more data not provided, but just structurally because people like you [gestures to Jenny] are holding two devices at the same time.

AG: Someone like Google would want to get closer to solving [this problem]. The only thing that stops them is Apple. The fact that some of these companies hate each other is at least preserving some of our privacy.

MV: 2013 is going to be the year of complexity. I’m going to go buy a farm and plant some chia seeds.

In the Puget Sound area of Washington State, the Seattle SEO Network holds a pair of monthly meetings: one for Pro SEOs to exchange ideas and help each other learn, and another to bring together SEOs and local business people starting in the world of online marketing who might not know a <title> tag from a local search citation.

Having volunteered my time for much of my professional career with industry user groups, I attend the Seattle meet-ups when I can (which unfortunately means not often enough). Still, it’s always great to meet new people and hear new perspectives about today’s online marketing challenges.

At a recent meeting, one of the new attendees asked an excellent question of the pro SEOs in attendance. He said he had repeatedly heard the generic recommendation to “publish great content”.

But what he really wanted to know was this: what is “great content” exactly?

The question is not as simple as it sounds. The range of answers generated by the SEOs in the crowd was impressive and interesting. I thought I’d share some of them here with you in case one of our newer readers might be interested in the answer.

Defining great content depends on your point of view. What does it consist of, how is it used, and how to measure its value, are just some of the perspectives to be considered. Let’s take a look at how this breaks down.

What Does Great Content Consist Of?

First of all, great content is something that can be easily read by a person browsing your website. But that’s not where it ends. In fact, that’s where it starts!

Great content also has to be easily read by a computer, such as a search engine crawler. Since crawlers are generally not very intellectually flexible entities, we need to spoon-feed them content that they can technically consume, and more importantly than anything else, this needs to be in the form of text.

But when I say text, I don’t just mean the appearance of letters and numbers on the screen. I mean good, old fashioned ASCII text in the page. Text content shown by means of rich Internet application (RIA) technologies like JavaScript, Flash or Silverlight may make for fancy pants presentations, and it usually helps designers look unduly impressive in the eyes of unsuspecting clients, but more often than not, at least in terms of search crawlers, it’s actually a disaster.

As you may know, search engines can’t reliably read content buried in such types of rich technology. Same goes for text presented within images, videos, animations, and the like. All of that important text is buried in binary files.

Now truth be told, Google does occasionally employ optical character recognition (OCR) technologies in an effort to decipher the buried secret messages these otherwise inaccessible technologies are hiding, and they are also making progress (albeit slowly) on reading some bits of JavaScript, but it’s definitely not an optimal way to feed the beast.

The beast wants text, so instead of using RIA or graphics for pretty text, use CSS technologies to make your text look fancy while keeping the page easily digestible for a search crawler.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One big piece of advice: if you really are a true fan of flashy, blinky, loud, colorful, and otherwise cool RIA content, do a favor for your site and your end users who are not fans of the flashy, blinky by making your RIA content accessible by down-level users. These users include those who choose not to install browser plug-ins, those who surf with old or incompatible browsers, and to the point, those who are simple search crawlers.

The process of providing a lesser, secondary experience for these users is known as graceful degradation, and while it’s a bit more work to do (and certainly less sexy than flashy, blinky), it’s also critical for getting the content of that page reliably indexed in search.

Content Is The Secret Sauce

What’s in Search’s Secret Sauce?

While you’re thinking about page text, don’t forget the search secret sauce: writing on-page metadata, aka content about the content on the page.

If you ignore writing great, unique, and optimized text for <title> and <meta> description tags, you’re missing an invaluable opportunity to define the theme of the page for both human users and crawlers.

Same advice goes for <h1> tags and <img> alt text. The <title> and <meta> description are typically used in the search engine results pages (SERPs) list (<title> text being the blue-link text, and the <meta> description text serving as the descriptive snippet beneath the blue link text).

The <h1> serves as the on-page headline for the page, and the <img> alt text is where you can define the content of the image in text form (and aim to make the alt text relevant to the page instead of just a generic image description).

Best of all, the text in the tags <title>, <h1> and <img> alt text are valued by search engines as high quality sources for defining keywords for the page.

Bottom line: Write great content for human consumption, but think of your primary readers as humans who rely on using computer screen reader applications. If you write great text content for people that is readable by computers, you and your readers all win!

How Is Great Content Used?

Great content serves a very important purpose: it informs the reader about the topic of the page. When great content is smartly developed and used strategically, it easily accomplishes the following tasks:

• Helps people understand the topic
• Demonstrates your unique expertise or angle on the subject
• Makes people want to come back and read it again
• Makes people want to link to it so other people can access it from their website, blog, social network feed, etc.
• Compels people to do the following:
  • Buy something on the site
  • Download a document, a file, or an app
  • Write a review or endorsement
  • Subscribe to a site’s RSS feed
  • Follow the author’s Twitter account
  • Generate a Like on the author’s Facebook page
  • Submit the page to StumbleUpon or Reddit
  • Submit their email address to subscribe a periodic newsletter from the same author

Great content is what the Web was originally designed to facilitate. Write what you know, make it compelling, and people (and search engines) will respond accordingly. It may take time, of course, but even viral content starts with an initial post.

But How Do You Create Great Content?

Great content is, well, great! Of course, that can also be a relative thing. It’s like the old story of being in the woods with a bunch of your coworkers when you accidentally encounter an ill-tempered bear. When the chase begins, you personally don’t need to outrun the bear (good luck with trying that). You only need to outrun the other people you’re with.

Sure, that’s a grizzly (pun intended) tale with a morally ambiguous message, but that’s why I made the other people your coworkers. Business is business, after all!

If the lack of great content is what separates your site from your competitors in the SERPs, then you’re not likely to ever surpass them by corner-cutting moves. You’ll need to invest in developing that great content you know you need. Hey, if getting high page rank was easy, anyone could do it!

So what is this elusive great content you need to create? Read what you have on your site’s pages and ask yourself the following questions (or better yet, ask someone who is not biased toward your site so you’ll get an honest answer):

• Is the content informative?
• Is it authoritative on the subject matter?
• Is it interesting?
• Is it well-written (complete sentences are important, but so is approachable writing rather than being stodgy)?
• Is longer content broken up into well-organized sections by headings?
• Does the content make good and interesting use of visual elements?
• Is the writing free of embarrassing spelling errors or remedial grammar problems?
• Is it written appropriately toward its intended audience?
• Is the content free of industry-insider jargon, focusing instead on terminology your readers would use (and search for)?
• When appropriate, does the content show your unique voice or even a sense of humor?

If you answered No to any of the above, think about your approach and redo it.

How Do You Measure The Value Of Content?

To be sure, while offering the best possible content is always a laudable goal, often the resources for making that happen are very hard to come by. If your site is in a small niche market, take a close look at your online competition in search. If those sites are dull, boring, and uninteresting, you might get away with being just a little better than them. At least for a while.

If the bear is really hungry, in time, an ambling trot in your part may not be enough. Nor may be a half-hearted attempt to post a lazy, “slightly better than the competition” paragraph on a few pages. Sure, it’s a start, but it’s only a start. Corner-cutting optimizations are a tough way to achieve success, especially in the long run.

But what if the online competition is heated, competitive, and you’re up against top-ranked pages? Just understand that search engines, like people, really like great content.

So often websites are conceived as vehicles to promote a business, sell a product or service, or show off some technical handiwork, and writing page content is typically a last-minute (or last-second!) addition. It’s considered drudgery, mere junk to fill a void on the page. These are horrendous mistakes that completely miss the point of the Web, especially if a site owner wants it to be found (and ranked well) in search.

Creating great content should be part of the design process at the beginning. Use the website to tell your tale, show what makes you and your business special. This is the essence of great content.

Images from Shutterstock, used under license.

I get emails like the one below all the time, this one being from the talented owner of Castleview 3D Architectural Renderings:

“I need your help.  I realy don’t get the whole keywords/SEO/web marketing thing — but I know enough to know that I shouldn’t and don’t want to tackle it myself. I’m a small business (small = just me) and maybe I can’t afford you.  But I’d like to find out. I get solicited by 2 or 3 SEO firms a week, but something about them and their approach really puts me off.”

Therein lies the problem. There’s an old joke that “99% of lawyers give the other 1% a bad name.” I think that’s just as true with SEOs. There’s 1% of SEOs out there that actually know what they are doing and do it well. Of those, about one third are black hat and about two-thirds are white hat (that’s not scientific, just an educated guess).

Now consider the average starting fee for SEO services. According to SEOMoz’s 2011 survey, the average retainer fee for an SEO agency is $2500-$5000 a month.

So what is a small business like the one above to do? The popular answer would be to hire a single SEO – maybe one of the many consultants out there charging between $100-$150 per hour.

But for many small businesses, even that is too much. How do they compete with the huge companies who are able to spend 5K and up a month on services? And here’s the kicker…

Google Is Making It Worse

Google has implemented so many elements to their algorithm that rely on webmasters knowing detailed SEO (not just basics) that they are making it harder and harder for SMBs to compete.

Here is just a small list:

• Favoritism in logged-in listings given to sites that have Google+ profiles
• Pay to play Google Shopping
• Enhanced listings with schema.org tags
• Duplicate content reduction and consolidation with canonical tags
• Authorship tagging
• Link disavow tool (which even Google says not to use unless you know advanced SEO)
• Data sharing and control with Google Webmaster Tools*

*No algorithmic impact, but the ability to influence things like sitelinks that the majority of SMBs don’t even know exists.

When & Where Does It Stop?

I’ve asked at plenty of conferences if this is the new normal. Are the days of being able to just put up a website with great content and getting it ranked over?

The answer I always hear is that Google just needs help from us while it catches up to the technology available. I say that’s a cop-out. I don’t see Google doing anything to catch up to the technology. I see them continuing to target people who don’t know any better – SMBs who have unwittingly hired one of those “2 or 3 SEO firms that solicit [them] each week.”

Sure, Panda and Penguin are targeting spam, and that’s good for all of us “white hats,” but in most cases, the people who fall victim to that spam are the SMBs. Generally, the big brands have plenty of layers between the SEO and the decision maker to rely on plausible deniability. I’d like to see Google focus more on improving their ability to understand all types of content rather than continuing on this witch hunt.

And in the meantime? The number-one result in my area for “architectural rendering company” is a site with keyword stuffed text in their description tag and at the bottom of their home page. And Bing isn’t much better.

The #1 result there is for a different firm (located in Toronto, and I’m in the US), with keyword stuffed description tag and spammy anchor text links at the bottom of the home page. So clearly, the improvements to reduce spam aren’t working.

Side note: someone should tell the “SEOs” these sites hired that the description tag doesn’t impact ranking.

So my question to you, dear reader, is: have keywords stopped being a proxy to a customer?

In other words, if you create great content, can you get it ranked? Or will we allow authorship, canonicals, schema, and manipulation of keywords to become the new normal?

One more thought before you share your comments, and I hope you will. The following statement appears in Google’s current quality guidelines, and has been there since the first time they were published:

“Make pages [primarily] for users, not for search engines.” Primarily was added in June of 2008, and Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team) had this to say about it: “the spirit of that guideline is that users should be the primary consideration. But it is fine to do some things that don’t affect users but do help search engines.”

So, it’s ok to do these many things to help search engines understand your pages. But where do we (as users) draw the line? At what point are we designing pages more for search engines than for users?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.