Laura owns a well ranked online printing company. She hired an SEO firm because, despite her great rankings on what she deemed to be the top 5 keywords for her business, she had poor conversions.

Laura’s Initial Top 5 keywords:
Printing
check printing
screen printing
post card printing
digital printing

Laura had meticulously optimized her site for these 5 terms and her hard work and effort seemed wasted to her.

She thought it was her site and hired a designer to make her site more attractive, helpful and trustworthy, but sales had only increased 9%.

Her SEO firm helped her recognize that she offered more than just “printing”. Their initiative expaned her keywords to include the specific types of printing services she offers.

The SEO firm focused on 300 keywords that described specific types of printing that Laura’s company offered.

Sample of Keywords from the list of 300:
business card printing
poster printing
brochure printing
t shirt printing
t shirt screen printing
color printing
printing digital photography
photo printing

Her SEO firm methodically worked to optimize each type of printing service until Laura owned an entire keyword market segment for “printing” instead of just a few printing keywords. This approach in conjunction with her site redesign increased sales by 35% for Laura’s company.

By expanding her keyword selection, Laura was able communicate through the search engines with her current customer base, as well as to potential customers, about the specific types of printing services she offers.

Ranking for Traffic vs. Ranking for Conversions…

Larry wanted to be ranked highly on the search engines for the word “taxes” and “business taxes.” His SEO firm advised against this since he offered business legal services, none of which had anything to do with taxes.

Larry’s reasoning was simple: “business people do their taxes and if I can get ranked on these terms they will accidentally click on my site for help on taxes and thus be exposed to what I do for 5 seconds or so before they click off my site. Then when they do need business legal services some of them will remember me.”

Not likely. Individual searchers will leave a site quickly if it does not have the product or services envisioned when they typed in the search term. Using deceptive keywords to get people to your site will not increase sales, book marking your site, or inquiries into your services.

Larry agreed with his SEO firm which recommended the keyword focus on the specific types of legal services that Larry offered.

Sample of Keywords for Larry’s Business:
Form an LLC
Business agreements
Corporate records maintenance
Online corporate forms
Dissolve a business
Business dissolution
Trademark registration
DBA filing

Larry realized more qualified traffic to his site specifically because he, like, utilized keywords that said what they did. Both Larry and Laura recognized profit growth by both refining and expanding their keyword market segment.

Customer retention through search engines is executed by building relationships through the searches your customers execute regularly. By using keywords that focus on specific services or products you offer you ensure that you capture traffic from the customers of yours who have forgotten your url, forgotten your site name, forgotten your company name, but remember that there was this great site out there for blue widgets...

Customers are out there searching and you can strengthen your relationship with them by optimizing for their search. Communicate clearly what you offer, and they will find you again and again, book mark your site, inquire, purchase and come back!

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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.