Writing in her High Rankings blog, search engine optimization (SEO) expert Jill Whalen provides some welcome advice: stop being fixated with keywords and keyphrases that no longer give you optimal results!

Jill says that most of her clients tend to focus on achieving high search engine rankings for ‘pet phrases’ they believe will deliver more traffic. But it turns out that many people’s ‘pet phrases’ often:

1. Involve a lot of work to achieve high rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs); and
2. Are not the phrases that generate the highest conversions. (In other words they don’t tend to generate ‘qualified’ traffic).

The solution? Use analytics to find out what keywords ARE likely to lead to the highest conversions.

To this end, Jill suggests looking at your own website analytics. In addition to that – and especially if you’re going into a new market – I also recommend you do some heavy duty keyword research.

You want to find out what are the most popular keywords in your niche, and in particular, what your top competitors are optimizing for or, for pay-per-click purposes, are bidding on.

Source: Jill Whalen, “Is Your SEO Campaign Out of Focus?” High Rankings, April 29, 2009

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• Do You Need To Be No.1 In The Search Engines To Attract Your Most Qualified Prospects?
• SEO: How Your ‘Average Position’ in Google Really Affects Your Search Engine Traffic
• How Will Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Affect Your Search Engine Rankings?
• What Should You Expect From SEO?
• Free SEO Tools To Enhance Your Marketing

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.