Keyword indexing and goal conversions – the Funnel countdown.
17th May 2010 by Damian Koblintz
When I was working as a freelance marketing consultant, occasionally I’d be hired by a client to make recommendations on an existing Search Engine Marketing effort that they felt was not yielding the desired results. Damian, they would say to me, we’re ranking well for our desired keywords, and it’s driving a decent amount of traffic, but our sales could be better. What do you think? We’ll pay you in coffee, and the thanks of a nation.
Anyway, the problem was often not so much the keywords they’d targeted, or the execution of the search engine optimisation, but rather that they’d not paid enough attention to the purchasing funnel. In web marketing, we often talk about funnels; there are two types, essentially, a funnel that guides people to your website, and then another that guides visitors from your homepage, through choosing a product to paying for it. Getting some sort of financial return, afterall, is the main goal of a commercial website, if my memory of Capitalism and the Internet 101 is correct.
So, what’s my advice in this situation? To pay special attention to the three stages of customer development; to whit, Awareness, Research and Purchase. Or, to put it in terms of key phrases, “vacuum cleaners”, “Damian’s Vacuum Cleaner Reviews”, and finally “Buy Damian’s Supersucker 2000”. I’ve written previously on this blog about the power of user generated content , and without wanting to go into that more right now, customer reviews and the way you leverage them have a lot of search power at each stage.
Rather, the point that I’d like to stress is that you focus on the right search terms for each stage of the purchasing funnel. It might seem self evident, but you’d be surprised. Focussing on title and h1 tags, URLs and content so that potential customers at each stage of the process can drive more customers to your site at each stage of the process. You might feel that it’s more important to concentrate on ‘buy’ queries, but remember, the earlier you bring a customer to your site, the more likely it is that they’ll ultimately make their purchase from you. Once they are there, minimising the need for them to go offsite for information (such as price comparison, or reviews), will only increase your sales conversion rate.
So, the conclusion, really, is that if you’re not getting as much as you feel out of your SEO campaign, perhaps it’s time to look in a bit more detail at which keywords you’re targeting and where.
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