by Jens du Plessis
Perfin Web Services 2003 -
http://www.webmarketingsa.com
You planned your web site, you decided on your keywords and key phrases, you optimised your web design to target those keywords and key phrases, you loaded your web site, you registered your web pages, you obtained links to your web site for quicker listings on the robot search engines, you tweaked your web pages and
Now you are # 1 on Google!
Or at least on the first page, the Top 10 of Google and some of the other search engines.
But you're still not getting any decent traffic from the search engines.
And you do not understand this. After all your work and eventual success, you are still going nowhere..
The problem often lies in that you selected and focussed on the wrong keywords and phrases. When designing our web sites we do not think like the visitors and potential customers. We work with our knowledge of the subject and start focussing on the product we want to sell, rather than the results that the visitor will be looking for.
We often design our web sites around technical terms which the potential visitor, and our potential clients, do not even know let alone will search for. Unless our visitors and our target customers are in the same industry they will not know to look for these search terms. And even if they know them, they think differently and use search engines differently.
It hit home to me the other day with this new web site I am working on which is aimed at providing Internet marketing training programs and resources to people who put their off-line businesses on the Net.
I got to a point where I had a #8 ranking on Google for Internet marketing training, and some minor ones in the teens and the twenties, but I wasn't getting traffic. Then I went back to my stats to look at the search terms with which people are getting to my web site and hardly any came from Internet marketing training. They came through many different search terms. Here are a few examples:
steps to building up a ecommerce web site
up loading and setting up website
doing business on the net
start business web site building isp servers
learn about intenet
what makes a successful retail website
designing, hosting and maintaining of the website.
my website isn't ranked by google
internet marketing training
fast loading web pages
how design web
develop my own website in south africa
how effective is search engines on the south african market
steps how to start a website
That's how people often search, they enter their questions. Now, it will be impossible to try and cater for every variation but our job is to use this information to try and find a few search terms that are used in sufficient numbers to make it worth our while to focus on.
From these examples people do not use the term Internet marketing in the first place, that's one of our terms and they definitely were not looking for training, they were looking for the results they want, the benefits and here I was focussing on the product.
These search terms are only a guide. They are the people who found my web site, but those who didn't are more important. Using these as a guide I must look for other, more popular terms with which people should be getting to web site but don't.
Do yourself a favour, if you are getting the Google rankings but not the traffic, go and take a look at the search term people are using to get to your web site. You may have tunnel vision, and may be targeting the wrong search terms with your web site and not the search terms your potential customers are actually using.
Put yourself in your customers' shoes and try to think how they would search for your product if they didn't know it existed. What are the one or two main benefits that they can get from your products AND that they are looking for? Then go and check these terms on Wordtracker and Overture to find out if they are popular enough to focus on.
Getting #1 rankings on the search engines are not enough, you must get it for search terms that your potential customers are using in sufficient numbers.
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Jens du Plessis is the author of:
Get Listed, Get Ranked, Get Noticed - The ONE Secret to getting FREE, Unlimited, Targeted Search Engine Traffic.
Included in The Ultimate Online Business Marketing eBook Collection http://1secret.webmarketingsa.com
More articles at Internet Marketing Business School: http://www.webmarketingsa.com/archives
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