Optimisation: Search Relevance
Optimising Your Keywords and Key Phrases to Aid Customer Search
Everyone talks about SEO and website optimisation as the best formula for getting a 24/7 coverage on the search engines and getting more hits on your website; and it is.
Search Relevance is Overlooked
But a far too often overlooked aspect is the quality of the clicks/hits you are getting. Whether you use pay per click or SEO it is all wasted if the person who hits your site has no interest in the products or services you have to offer.
Just think about all that money, time and effort you put into making sure your paid per click or natural search listing is top of the search ranking and the actual cost of getting that hit on your website.
Now think how all that money and effort is wasted if the person who hits your site was looking for something different to what you offer.
Hits are ot the only Answer
Just looking at how many hits you are getting is not enough. Website analytics are a crucial part of website optimisation. You can get free analytical solutions from Google and it will be explained in a later article how to use this effectively but for now the suggestion is that if you haven’t got any analytical software on your website you should be looking in to it sooner rather than later.
Analytics will help you understand how and where all your hits are coming from and where they are going. It will show you the source, whether free listing or paid for advertising, and how long people are staying on your web site and its different pages. It will also tell you your bounce rate.
What is the Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the term for people who find and click on your website through a search engine or similar facility and leave the site quickly without looking at other pages.
This is a clear indication that they came to your site looking for something after typing in a search keyword or phrase into a search engine, once they viewed your site they realise that they have made a mistake and you do not have what they are looking for they leave as quick as they arrived.
Decreasing Bounce Rate Through Optimised Keywords for Search Relevance
This is where monitoring the data from your analytics comes in together with a bit of common sense. By looking at and monitoring customer search terms and search behaviour, through your site, you will be able to redesign your site to be more relevant to their needs.
You also need common sense to understand your customer’s needs and search behaviour. Put yourself in their shoes and think about the types of search word and key phrases that you would use to find the services or products you offer. Here it is also good to avoid using trade, in-house terms or jargon, just because they make sense to you does not mean they do for your customers.
In Conclusion
Optimising your site is important. Optimising the page content, meta tags and title tags for the desired keywords and key phrases will help increase your ranking on all major search engines. But these keywords and key phrases have to be relevant to the customer and their search behaviour to increase conversion rates and customer loyalty.
Remember your online audience is more fickle and less patient than offline so get it right or they will move on somewhere else just with the click of a mouse.
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