3 Simple Ways to Multiply Keyword Effectiveness: Immediately!

A big part of my philosophy for strategic keyword management centres around three core activities:

• Knowing how people become aware of your site;
• Tracking how many of them actually visit your site;
• Observing what they do whet they get there.

Retailers who have primarily a bricks and mortar establishment can substitute "site" for "shop", "salon", "showroom", "office", and so on. The principle is the same; this isn't about pure SEO.

So, why are these three aspects of keyword research so important?

Keywords Help People to Find You

It doesn't matter whether you are the author of a book, a web site owner, or run a seaside café, people find you because they have needs or desires.

They will express those needs and desires in keywords; whether they want to ask someone in the street, or search online.

Someone who is looking for a latté in Bournemouth is going to be a lot more interested in a café that has a big sign in the window saying "Best Latté in Bournemouth or Your Money Back!" than one offering "Cut Price Cream Teas for Students".

It's the same online.

When someone performs a query, they're only going to click on a site that appears to confirm their needs or desires through the use of keywords. Not just the keywords they type, by the way, but also those that make one sit more attractive than another.

Knowing what keywords people have used to find your site (whether they've clicked through or not) is useful. It's also a measurable statistic provided by the Search Console, and also, via integration with SC, in StatCounter.com (although they still call it GWT!)

And, this metric is also useful offline: just ask customers how they found you, and from that you'll quickly work out what internal keywords they had in their minds when they made the decision to choose your establishment compared to the others on the high street.

Doing this analysis -- and acting on the results -- takes you from merely advertising, to attracting.

Measuring Attraction Helps Build a Better Campaign

Once you know which keywords are getting you visibility, you need to know which of them are also getting you visitors, or better still, customers.

Typically, a keyword campaign can have one of several goals:

• building awareness;
• attracting new customers;
• re-attracting existing customers;

In the first case, all you want to know is whether your brand is getting seen. Search engines are making that a lot easier these days by including extracts from the landing page associated with a keyword alongside the result.

Managing that meta-data is a vital part of SEO.

The second case is linked to actions. You need to know, having gained awareness, which conjunction of keywords and search entry lead to action. That means putting non-active keywords in the meta-data so that it is displayed.

A non-active keyword is one that is not part of the keyword phrase which defines the primary motive for a search user: for example, the query "latté bournemouth" will return a page of results, and if one of the displayed meta-data snippets contains the word 'free', that café may well find the attract more custom, but "free" is not an active keyword.

The resulting campaign may well be a combination of the active and non-active keywords, for example, a PPC campaign using the keyword phrase 'free latté bournemouth'. 

(I'm not saying that's necessarily an example that will work in the real world, by the way, but if you go through the motions, the result may well be positive!)

Finally, using trackable keyword phrases in your re-activation campaigns also helps to improve them; re-attracting customers by email or physical mailing is much easier if you have researched the keywords that your target market uses to find your competitors.

All of these work online as well as offline. Offline measurement methods just tend to be a bit more involved. Offline or not, however, measuring the behaviour that stems from a simple customer visit provides the best measure of how effective a keyword campaign has been.

Behavioural Analysis Measures the Effectiveness of Keywords

There used to be -- actually, I still use a variation -- a measure called KEI. This stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and was supposed to represent the relative ease with which it was possible to score highly in the SERPs.

It was a simple measure: all it really did was manipulate the anticipated volume and number of competing sites to try and gauge your chances of hitting the top 10.

Here's a funny anecdote, though.

On one of my own sites that I use for researching strategies, I have a highly effective keyword that isn't in the top 10. It's barely in the top 100. And, in terms of the CTR alone, it's reasonably effective:

What's more, as you can see from the screen shot, it's also not an isolated case; there's one right next to it with a similarly impressive CTR.

When I dig into the "Visitor Activity" log provided by StatCounter.com, I can see that, for the target market, these queries both have above average engagement based on the landing page:

• higher visit time
• more pages viewed
• repeat visits

This view is derived from knowing which page a visitor is likely to land on as a result of the query (by conducting a live query) and reviewing the Visitor Activity for that URL.

Expanding the search to related pages confirms that this query is more effective than many that appear nearer the top of the SERPs. That is, for the pages that are also returned as a result (but even lower down the SERPs) they also show high levels of engagement and conversion.

This is part of the attraction of the so-called long tail, of course. More specific pages with highly niche information that don't necessarily attract the most traffic are quite often the most effective when measured in terms unrelated to pure volume and cost.

Bigger, as they say, is not always better.

For a solid, step by step approach to keyword research that has consistently proven to be unaffected by algorithm changes, download the Keyword Research Blueprint!

How Answering 3 Simple Questions Can Triple Your Bottom Line!

The chances are that if, as an online or bricks and mortar retailer, you can't answer these three questions, you are leaving most of your profits up for grabs by your competition.

So, what are those 3 magic questions? Glad you asked:

1. How did the customer find you?
2. What did they do when they walked through the door?
3. Did they buy anything, and if so how much did they spend?

This could have been the shortest article on the blog, because I've just given you the three magic keys that will unlock the potential of your retail business. And, that's not just sales hype.

(Okay, there's a bit in there, because I want to to get excited -- you'll take it in better -- but bear with me: I'm not selling anything except myself!)

Whoever you turn to for marketing philosophy, and my favourite is Dan Kennedy, the initial message is usually the same. A retail business has to do three things:

1. Get customers.
2. Get customers to spend more.
3. Get customers to spend more frequently.

See the link?

Obviously, there are many different ways to approach this -- from referrals to mailing lists, product launches to affiliate schemes -- as well as huge differences between online and offline strategies, but all growth strategies start by looking at these three areas.

Let's do a little walk-through.

If you know how your current customers find you, then, you can figure out how to get more. Even if you don't have any customers, or even visitors, you can still work out how to get more by using the Zero Traffic Keyword Research Technique.

What about number 2? Well... ideally you'd like to give everyone that walks through the door a stopwatch and GPS tracker to see what they get up to. 

In the bricks and mortar world of retailing, the closest you can realistically get is a simple time-and-motion study to try and see what products are being sold. Not to mention whether they're sold together, and where shoppers spend their time...

Online, however, there are many tools to help you figure out what your visitors are doing. For example, Google Analytics has a graphical display that shows you where they come in, where they drop out, and what they do along the way (as well as how long they spend doing it.)

Most of my clients has only ever used this for funnel analysis; but I think that's a waste, especially since you can combine it with Search Console data to see which keywords are driving their behaviour!

Then there's number 3, which is always a tougher nut to crack.

If you're in a 'replenishables' business (think printer cartridges, or razor blades) you have a built-in reason to get your customers to come back and buy more of your products.

In both the online and offline world, the best way to achieve repeat sales is through a list. An online mailing list through which you can continue to offer wisdom, ideas, and solutions, or its offline equivalent which is usually combined with a loyalty programme.

Of course, unlike in Ghostbusters, these streams can be mixed.

Keyword research is helpful here, too, because you want to participate in a conversation that is already going on in the market, and the best way to make sure you're doing that is to see what the market is looking for online.

Those are the three questions; and I've given you some of the many ways that they can be answered. The next bit is over to you -- depending on how much groundwork you've done, it might take an hour per week, or it might take a day.

The trick is to do it on an ongoing basis, and make sure that you are getting 100% out of your online traffic, or real world footfall.

How Keyword Research can Help High Street Retailers

I strongly believe that the death of the high street has been greatly exaggerated, and that online retail in many segments isn’t going to kill it just yet.

There are, of course exceptions.

Independent bookshops, for example, as well as larger well-known high street bookstores have felt the pinch and, in many cases, closed down. The recent demise of BHS can partially be attributed to a lack of online presence at a time when competition via the likes of Amazon, arguably a virtual departments store, is increasing daily.

On the other hand, there’s a social aspect to shopping in the high street that cannot easily be replicated online. There are novel combinations of online and offline -- which I call hybrid retailing -- that mix up the offering so that it feels modern, has the convenience of modern online retail, but benefits the high street.

Then there are those services that can not be delivered online -- beauty treatments, for example -- where the physical presence of the customer is a requirement.

However, at the same time, all retailers, be they online, high street, or hybrid, need to make keyword research part of their competitive advantage in order to succeed.

Here’s a nightmare scenario: a street with two or three salons, each offering similar treatments, within walking distance -- natural retail clustering -- being compared by a gaggle of young, image conscious, Instagramming ladies, all with smartphones.

Where just a few short years ago, the conversation might have included phrases such as “This place looks nice”, or “My friend got her nails done here”, these days it’s much more likely that the internet is used as the sole point of reference when deciding which salon to favour with their business.

Restaurants are in the same boat. As are fashion outlets. Or, in fact, any retailer in a price-sensitive market where online comparison is quick and easy. Just ask your local bookshop; except you can’t, because they have probably gone the way of the dodo.

I’m not going to say that all of the above can be avoided just by adding keyword research to your weekly task list; but it might just help you to stay ahead of the competition long enough to start to let it really help you develop a business that the market wants.

That’s the key to retail: delivering quality products to a hungry market.

Picking the market’s hive mind has never been easier. You no longer have to go out into the street with a clipboard to find out what’s hot; these days you can just go online.

There’s social media, there are blogs, and even forums where both customers and fellow retailers meet up to discuss the products and services that will shape tomorrow.

Platforms like Quora, Yahoo Answers, and even Amazon’s review and feedback system can all be used to fuel your money making machine. You just have to know how to mine that information, arrange it appropriately for analysis, and spot the outliers.

(If you sign up for my valuable mailing list, which delivers quality tutorials, recommendations, reviews and other stuff that I don’t share with just anyone, I’ll give you my eBook “The Keyword Research Blueprint Cheatsheet” for free, which will give you a head start!)

The key to unlocking the value that your market is sharing with each other -- and hence you -- on an hourly basis is ...wait for it... keyword research.

Humans are a communicative bunch. We’re also very fond of sharing -- usually marketing courses point out that we prefer to complain than praise, but the principle remains the same -- and because we like to share, we tend to already think in terms of keywords.

It’s natural: if you go to the library and ask for a book, you use specific words that convey what you want. The more accurate you are, the better the choices the librarian makes for you, and the more chance you have of getting a book that you will enjoy and find useful.

Keyword research also works across locations and languages. If you want to know the top three Chinese language searches in the UK related to restaurants; keyword research will tell you.

(By the way, they are “Michelin restaurant”, “working!!!” and “Shanghai Restaurant Week”, but in Chinese of course... If you’re in that business, there were 480 searches, 491K results almost none of the first page local to the UK, despite the searches having been conducted there. Let me know if you’re interested in a full report, when you sign up for your free eBook!)

Once you’ve saved your retail business, you can then use ongoing keyword research to grow it; participating in your market’s ongoing conversations using terms they’re already familiar with, and associating those terms with actions to improve conversion, and retention rates, as well as increasing average customer value.

All this is possible, and more, once you have an understanding of keyword research, and a blueprint to follow...