Search Engine Optimization

The overarching goal of SEO and SEM is to drive traffic to a company’s website. This can be done is various ways, but they all amount to creating numerous inbound pathways to various pages of the website. Correctly determining and implementing appropriate keywords throughout webpage content is one of the most important things a website owner can do to help promote their site. However, when website owners start to focus on creating a website that is optimized only for the search engine crawlers, neglecting the user-experience, it doesn’t matter how much traffic is pushed to the site, visitors will leave as soon as they arrive. The two components have to work hand-in-hand and receive equal attention for complete SEO success.

Google Analytics can help a website determine what keywords are pulling visitors in and to what page of the site. Keyword research will show a website owner what users are searching for. The goal should be to edit the pages that aren’t drawing traffic and enhance the ones that are by incorporating new keywords with the old ones that work. What website owners need to be conscious of is keyword stuffing. Content should be optimized for search engine spiders but always written for users. It can be incredibly distracting and irritating to a visitor when every other word is a keyword variation. If a website annoys a visitor enough, they will leave and not come back. Driving users away will eventually lower a website’s search result rankings and hinder any other SEO efforts.

To learn how testing can help positively impact your site’s user experience, check out this other SEO Journal post.

A good rule of thumb is to select 2-5 keywords per page based on the content. Website owners should remember that they keywords have to be page specific. The website might sell rain boots, but the “About Us” page isn’t about the products. Therefore the keywords shouldn’t focus on rain boots. Incorporating keywords that have little to do with the page content detracts from the overall user-experience and can be frustrating to a user looking for specific information and not being able to accurately locate it.

User experience also comes into play when working on a website’s link building activities. Blog commenting is a very common and a very useful tool. But just like keywords need to be relevant, so do the blogs being posted on, the comments being written and the links being used. The rain boot company shouldn’t be commenting on an Italian food blog as the two have little in company. Perhaps the comment does focus on Italian food, but the posted link leads to the “women’s rain boot styles“ page of the website. Now a less-targeted user is being drawn—some would consider tricked—to the site and they won’t stay for long. Search engines take into account where a site’s inbound links are coming from. Irrelevant and untrustworthy links reflect poorly on the website.

At the end of the day, SEO means little without good user-experience. Visitors are the ones looking to make a purchase, find relevant information and interact with the company. The two need to work together, not in opposition, in order to produce the best SEO results and overall user-experience to help promote the website, company and online brand.

If you were to look at the average search engine user, their search history would boil down to three basics types of search—informational, transactional and navigational. An informational search is when they are looking for information, perhaps the answer to a question. Transactional searches are when a user is looking to take action, they’ll use words like “buy” or “download” in their search query. Navigational searches are when a user searches by brand or product name.

All three of these search types are important and your site has to be optimized for each one of them. Informational search is usually the easiest to optimize your site for. It’s just a matter of selecting and incorporating the right keywords on your site’s pages. Navigational search occurs when all your other marketing efforts are working together to help build your brand visibility. But I see a lot of sites fail to fully optimize for transactional searches.

A user who is conducting a transactional search is nearing the end of their buying cycle. They have conducted all the research and are ready to make a purchasing decision. You want your site to be the one they purchase from! Oftentimes a user conducting a transaction search isn’t looking for a specific company or brand; they are focusing on the product. For instance, they search “buy women’s running shoes” instead of “Nike women’s running shoes” or “best women’s running shoes.” “Buy women’s running shoes” is a transactional search. “Nike women’s running shoes” is a navigational search and “best women’s running shoes” is an informational search. You want to make sure your site shows up for “buy women’s running shoes.”

Users conducting transactional searches are often more willing to comb through the search results then those conducting informational searches. They might click through several pages of results until they find exactly what they are looking for.

A great (and simple) way to optimize your site for transactional searches is simply to include call-to-actions throughout your page content and site components like Meta tags and descriptions. If your website sells computer software, incorporate phrases like “Download a free trial of our X software today!” Other buzzwords like “buy,” “order,” “purchase,” “sign up” and “try” make great call-to-actions and can help your site rank for transactional searches.

Attaching these call-to-action words to your targeted keywords is also a great way to turn a competitive keyword into a long-tail keyword. While the number of transactional searches may not be as high as the number of informational searches, those users conducting transactional searches got money to spend and they want to spend it! Make sure this highly targeted visitor finds your site!

At Brick Marketing, we consider the first phase of SEO to be on-site optimization. Some other SEO professionals may disagree, but I believe you have to have a well optimized site before you even bother to start on link building. But the debate over which is more important—on-site SEO or link building—is for another day. Regardless of which comes first or is more important, the simple fact is that in order to optimize a site, there has to be content to optimize! Meta tags and H1 tags are important and should be optimized, but they won’t make up for a lack of site content.

I had a client who worked in home renovation design and build. While conducting keyword research for them, I found a lot of great keywords that focused on specific areas of the home—kitchen renovation, bathroom remodel, living room design and build—and so forth. These were all great keywords for this company. The problem was, as I looked at their site, I realized that they didn’t have pages to use to these new keywords on!

Keywords have to be page specific. Bathroom centric keywords need a bathroom renovation page to be used on. They shouldn’t be the focus of the homepage. Their existing site didn’t have these pages. They just had a generic design and build page that explained their process. While there was a lot of great content on that page, it had its own set of appropriate keywords. Incorporating “kitchen redesign” would mean sacrificing one of those keywords.

If your site doesn’t have the content to support them, you can’t include those keywords. That means you’re missing out on the traffic that comes from those keywords. Depending on which words and phrases you are forced to leave out, it could be hundreds of thousands of potential visitors that will never even see your site!

There is nothing wrong with adding a few more pages to your site in order to go after more keywords. Like my client adding a bathroom design page, a kitchen design page and a special projects page. Each of those pages has the potential to rank in the search engines and become a point of entry for traffic. Think about a car dealership website, they don’t lump every brand of car onto one page. Most likely they have a page for each brand of car, making it easier for visitors to find the car they want and so the dealership can go after those keywords.

The trick is to not go overboard with the pages. If the car dealership had a Toyota page, then a Corolla page, then a separate page for each year of Corolla in stock, which further divided into pages for each make and model, it gets too cluttered. Site navigation plays a big role in user-experience and SEO. Sometimes you can combine a few pages with limited content into one very successful, content-juicy page.