Being a strong middle man is crucial to your return on Search Engine Optimization. Before embarking on an all out SEO blitz, it’s important to take a step back and analyze the semantics of the phrases you are targeting. Sure, you’ve analyzed the search volume of all the phrases that are relative to your products or services.
Getting the Wrong Traffic? Pass it On...
Sure, you’ve created landing pages as mouse traps for each of these phrases. Sure, you’ve optimized all of your meta tags, internal links and even had your favorite SEO company build some links for you (you chose SEO Design Solutions, right?). You’ve done all this, so what have you missed?
An often overlooked result of optimizing is indirect traffic received from semantically related phrases. What does this mean? It means that by targeting the phrase “blue marbles”, you may get some traffic for “blue marble floors”. Maybe some baller wants to put his house on MTV CRIBZ and is looking for blue marble floors, and not the blue marble balls, and your site happens to be high up on a search engine’s relevance score for this phrase. So what do you do?
When analyzing those keywords it’s very important to recognize phrases that garner search volume that are VERY closely related semantically, to the phrases that are directly relative to your product offering. Next, take a look at who’s on the 3rd and 4th page for those phrases. Pick up the phone, give them a call, and work out an affiliate plan for referrals.
It may be as simple as placing a small banner on your blue marbles page, that says “looking for marble floors”. Or perhaps you want to create an entirely new landing page for this product (if there’s enough search volume, and the price point is high, I would consider this). Either way, don’t miss out on possible kick backs from indirect traffic that you’ve earned, but maybe didn’t realize you could get!
One way to look for opportunities such as this is to skim your analytics platform and look at pages with high bounce rates or obscure keywords driving traffic where semantic variations such as this may send a confusing message to potential visitors.
There are multiple ways to monetize your website, why overlook traffic and its ability to create a profitable transaction, even it is from unforeseen keywords and key phrase variations as a result of unintentional optimization. Try not to confuse bounce rate with lack of conversion, it may be that the wrong escape hatch “banner, contextual advertisement, link or video“, is merely present, and an edit is in order to reap the benefits of the highest return on investment for your burgeoning web asset.
