“Help Keywords” Expand Your Customer Relationships

When searchers type in keywords like “maternity clothing review”, “best maternity clothes” or “maternity clothing information” they are seeking information. Optimize (or create if you haven’t already) the information pages on your site for these types of “help keywords.”

One client of ours owns an online nursing and maternity clothing store and put her English degree to good use writing articles about selecting the best nursing and maternity clothing.

Pregnant and nursing women are often too busy for shopping, however the fit and feel of clothing during this time of a women’s life is crucial. So naturally it is important to provide a large amount of information about the clothing.

We optimized her articles with “help keyword” phrases that contained terms like “best”, “review”, “softest” and “quality.” These keywords led prospects, who needed help making their purchasing decisions, to her site.

If she had optimized only for “direct sale” keywords she would have missed on getting visits from people still researching. Those researching your products or services are absolutely worth optimizing for, no matter what you sell.

On the maternity clothing’s information pages we included several purchase suggestions. For example an article we optimized for the phrase “best nursing bra” had examples of top-selling nursing bras with feature benefit statements that showed why the most expensive nursing bra was the best over all deal.

Women who need nursing bras also need nursing pads. My client focused on this as a cross sell opportunity on nursing bra info pages. Ahh… the circle of shopping continues.

We also gave visitors the opportunity to subscribe to the emails detailing the next season’s online “must have” garments for pregnant and nursing women. With subscriber information the client can “push” review information to her customer, creating another channel for developing her client relationship.

Being helpful is good but don’t forget to create opportunities for community to develop:

We advise many of our clients to create situations where a sense of community can form, channels such as forums, q&a articles, and blogs that allow and encourage reader comments.

For our maternity clothing site clients we first published her vast database of articles we had just optimized with an online PR firm. We provided 2 URLs for each article, one pointing to her website and the other pointing to her blog.

Each night she wrote a blog post about what it is like to be a new mom and responded to questions posted by readers. We optimized her blog as well for the “help keywords” similar to the ones we chose for her articles.

Frequently she received questions directly on her blog asking about her articles and her responses often gave her opportunity to direct readers to her shopping site.

For consumer products like maternity clothes the time between research and purchase can be very short. To increase your online sales it’s vital that you create content that will help your prospects learn more about your products and optimize it for help “keywords.”

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About the Authors:

Tansy OBryant and Mark Schurtman are Marketing Managers for WebSourced’s KeywordRanking, the global leader in professional search engine marketing.