Keyword Tweaking – Needed or Not?

When conducting SEO, you must target the most effective keywords that are relevant to your site. When your site needs a keyword upgrade, there are a few things you should do to prevent your web-pages from becoming even less efficient.

First, make sure it’s a keyword issue, and not broken links, weak content, or lack of promotion. Keywords that under-perform are sometimes affected by other factors, so it is important to look at your website as a whole.

Since reaching the first page of the SERPS is hard, if you have managed it you really may want to consider long and hard before switching your keywords and having to start over.

Use a good web analytics program to understand different issues which could be negatively impacting any single page’s performance. This will give you additional insight as to the habits of the consumers who visit your site who are drawn in by targeted keywords. You can look at how they see your site compared with those who arrive by other means such as paid search.

Once you have familiarized yourself with your consumer base, you can start to isolate the best possibilities for enhancing your site’s user engagement. You need a solid balance between keyword optimization and good polished content

Look for keywords that are over or under-performing from a visitor / conversion point of view. Sometimes a tweak of the page is all that is needed, or even lifting a high performing word out and giving it its own page.

Look where your customers go after a brief time on a ‘low performing’ page. If they follow a pattern of eventually converting, perhaps the page is doing its job after all. If they back out and take another route consistently, consider restructuring your page flow.

Run tests. A landing page test, split A/B or A/B/C can bring to light hidden weaknesses and help you figure out how to strengthen your call to action. Usability tests and focus groups are a good way to get information directly from consumers, and Google’s Website Optimizer can also help by showing two different groups of visitors different versions of your landing page – this immediately shows you which one is more successful at engaging visitors.