Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

One only needs to have a look through some of your analytics and apply some well thought out filters to your keyword data and you begin to get the picture.

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

Having a fresh look at you keyword data, especially asking the question “Which products/services/areas bring the client the best value for money?“ and “What is their USP,  what makes them stand out from the rest?” allows you to explore the keywords data in more detail (keyword research 101). Tie this together with good analytics review and some proper thinking about where exactly to focus the promotional work for the campaign and you begin to get a good idea of what you should be doing in the next few weeks.

Take these thoughts back to the website and have another look at how it all matches up and often you will be surprised at what you find, no matter how many times you do this exercise. (We found an area that opened up to us on a five year old client, which we have since successfully optimised for resulting in loads more targeted traffic). The simple explanation is that when we originally designed the campaigns we targeted specific niches and put off other areas for a later date, exactly in order not to have the scattergun approach I mentioned above! As time passed we achieved the goals of the original campaigns and it was time to unlock further areas which we had initially put aside.

Usually the first thing that strikes me is how poorly the on-site optimisation matches up with the specifics of your plan. Often the quickest wins is to simply make sure that you are passing some good vote topic matching you campaigns and ensuring that this ties up closely with the titles (and copy) of your chosen on-site pages. Take the opportunity to bring in some copy text cross linking. The simplest place is often linking back up in the site architecture to higher level category pages from deeper within the site (instead of vice versa).

Make sure you are tracking your results! Put a system in place that will ensure you get ranking reports for the new areas you are targeting. Committing your plan to a regular report makes you feel more accountable for the strategy. SEO is not all about rankings, but receiving a report in your inbox that shows movement keeps it all real and fresh. It inspires you to have another look at the analytics and have a closer look at those pages and the visitors they are now attracting, and if you spend a little more time on it you start looking at how well this new traffic is converting. All round it is a good starting point to make sure that you don’t forget what you set out to do a few weeks back! You will be pleasantly surprised with what opens up! And then don’t forget to go back and review the keywords!

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