VIRGINIA SEO
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SEO
Search Engine Optimization encompasses a wide variety of techniques in which your website can be better tracked and displayed by Google (the largest search engine). Through comprehensive management your site can have the largest chance of succeeding.
CONTENT GENERATION With the recent Google algorithm changes, content generation, publishing, and blogging are the keys to ranking a site and driving traffic. Through careful management, your business can reap the benefits of constant content.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social Media Marketing is an important part of any business, large or small. As social media develops, businesses are finding new and innovative ways in which to sell products and attract customers. Can you afford to ignore a possible revenue stream?
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4 Risks of Not Tracking Your Keywords virginiaseo.org /blog/4-risks-of-not-tracking-your-keywords/
Why Tracking Your Keywords Is Important Keywords allow an Internet user to track down a specific website online. With hundreds of millions of websites available, locating just one can often prove next to impossible. In order to help with this, search engines allow individuals to type in set keywords (words, phrases, even sentences) that take them to the desired website (Think: “how do i build a deck” for example). Of course, a different configuration of keywords can vastly change what sort of search results come up. Due to this, a website owner needs to always know not only what sort of keywords they have targeted on their own website, but how each keyword is performing in terms of bringing in outside traffic. If the owner or administer does not track the keyword performance, there really is no way of telling what is going on, and everything simply becomes a guessing game. We often have businesses come to us and say “Well, my previous SEO company has me ranked as #1 for 30 terms…”. After looking into them, only 1 of them generates traffic. Hate to break it to you, but if you can for 1,000 keyword phrases that generate no traffic, what is the point? Although there are all sorts of different issues with not tracking keywords, here are some of the top risks a small business owner faces if they decide to avoid doing this.
Spend More Time Trying to Bring in Traffic When a web admin or business owner does not monitor keyword performance, there is no way of actually knowing what works and what doesn’t. This means they are either going to spend no time changing their keywords, which means nothing ever is improved upon and the website does not gain any sort of traffic bonus, or the web admin or business owner is going to spend much more time with a trial and error approach in order to determine which keyword is working. This trial and error approach requires the admin to change the keywords and monitor the website performance over a set period of time to see if the traffic goes up or down. This trial and error approach can prove incredibly damaging as it takes months just to discover what words work, and by that time, interest might have shifted, which means those particular keywords might no longer be relevant any longer. We spend a good deal of time doing keyword research up front, which saves us time in the backend. Our preferred tools are Market Samurai, LongTail Pro, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and SEO Profiler. We also have two individuals do the keyword research and “compare notes”. This helps prevent outliers and errors and also helps to ensure we capture everything from multiple idea angles.
Spend More on Keywords When creating keywords, especially when creating keyword ads in order to bring clients into a website, a web admin or business owner might simply go with the more expensive keywords as these are
deemed more popular. The problem with these expensive narrow terms is that they are far more costly and competitive, and will generate a higher cost-per-click. So, they are fine with paying more because it brings in the desired traffic. However, there is what is known as “low-hanging fruit” termed as long tail keywords. This is when a particular keyword set is far less expensive than the other, similar keywords, but it is drastically over performing for its price. It can also boost the SEO of the website with the low hanging fruit. An example of a narrow search target might be “ laptop computer“. This is going to be highly competitive and expensive to generate leads from. A long tail example might be “ slim laptop computer touchscreen dell“. This would be less competitive, easier to achieve higher ad placement, more traffic, for a lower cost. Less overall volume though! So, for someone who does not track their keywords, they are not going to identify these words, which means they are going to pay more for ad space and compete with larger companies while doing it.
Won’t Stay on Top For Long If a website finds itself on the top of a particular Internet search, the owner is going to feel pretty good, as they should. However, as search engine algorithms change, this might not last long. In fact, they could find themselves dropping after just a day or two. Due to this, it is necessary to understand how to change and flow with the search engine, which can only really be done if someone monitors their keywords and sees which way traffic is flowing. This way, they can move with the current. Without tracking, this is not possible and their search results will drop.
Poor Return on Investment It is impossible to understand a return on investment for the keywords when advertising. The only way to truly know what the ROI of the keywords is is to track the performance of the keywords over time. This includes both AdWords campaigns and organic campaigns. Tracking ROI of organic traffic is a little bit harder because of changes to Adwords, but if you can figure out what percentage of your traffic you convert to leads then sales, you can easily put a price per visit of customers, and then apply your keyword metrics to it. Looking to manage your own keywords and need help? Want to let professionals do it?
Chris Dill SEO Expert at Virginia SEO Chris loves web design, marketing, and anything on a computer. He is the creator and author of The Dill Design, a local Virginia web design company. Chris just finished his MSIS and is a network engineer.