I've been working with SEO for about 6 months now. I am administrating www.zmags.com - a company site about online publishing. The business is emerging and a common phrase for our products does not exist. (This makes keywords harvesting for PPC an endurance run). Thus I have tried out different SEO strategies, but I don't really know which one to follow. Phase 1 - I optimized for a common word "e-publishing" using this keyword as frequent as possible. It paid off and I got a page 1 ranking, but traffic from 1 keyword did not start the party. I then changed to another strategy by finding less used keywords and optimized the 20 most visited subpages for a few of these particular keywords. Now this also seem to succeed at some level. But the incoming traffic from these keywords are still pretty low. I believe the 2nd strategy is still the best to follow. As I collect more inbound links and get more traffic, my plan is to optimize for more used keywords like "digital magazine". I think the competition is too tough to settle for that now. Climbing up the tail - in other words. Is this the right approach in my situation? Comments are appreciated.
What you are doing wrong here is "proper keyword research" - I do not understand what did you mean by less used keyword? do you mean less searched keywords? From what I can understand, I would suggest you to move your strategy towards "generic keywords" and focus on that because they are more targetted. Thank you regards, Zafar Ahmed
@Zafar: Yes, that is "less searched keywords". Aiming for generic keywords can be a solution. But I guess that will enlarge the target group, right? My bounce rates are too high already, and I guess generic keywords would have a negative impact on that...
You should do proper keyword research to optimize your site choose high search volume and low competitive keywords so that you can get high ranking .
well, I thought I have been doing my keyword research. Obviously not good enough. I even used the tools from Digital Point Any suggestions to good tools where the search volume and the competition is measured as well?
Using those tools do not necessarily means the keyword they give you is good, with your a little more research, you can find out which keyword is targetting for your website and produce targetted traffic, not just someone who'd click and leave.
What? these are industry standard tools so how can you say they don't give you good keywords? lol. And if you read it said "Two good places to start", start being the optimum word there KP
If someone comes to your site by an inaccurate keyword, they will most likely immediately leave. This will have negative impact on Bounce rate. Also remember that even if the keyword matches your site perfectly, the content has to be appealing to them. Your site looks great, but was slow loading on my computer because of the flash. I also experienced an IIS error when clicking on one of the pages (when I reloaded the page, it loaded correctly). Error pages and slow loading pages usually make leave a website immediately if I just clicked on it from Google. These types of things would also have a negative impact on Bounce Rate.
Thanks for the feedback. However, these issues appear a little lower on my priority list. I keep a close eye to the bounce rates of the keywords through Google Analytics. From the PPC I have a bunch of good keywords to optimize for on the organic level. But again it seems like I should take a dig deeper and revise the keyword research...
Do keyword search, as well as market search for your product niche in your targeted business region. If you are going to "sell laptops online", in the Russian market, targeted keyword in English, still won't help you, your website or the business because 80% Russian uses Russian language for product search. Lot's of factor requires for the keyword research.
I agree. You should focus on generic keyphrases that can deliver traffic. What I have found is that if you can rank for the popular keyphrases, you tend to receive the long tail variations anyways. About 2 years ago, I started an SEO campaign focusing on 5 major keyphrases. Well now I rank for over 1000 different keyphrases that are a variation of my 5 main phrases.