How Keyword Research And SEO Increased Traffic
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Like most online internet marketing owners, we found some parents in a position where they had to stay at home to look after her young family. She soon struck upon the idea of starting up a gift site based
on people’s hobbies and interests. But she was faced with an SEO challenge ?how do you optimize a site when your biggest keyword is also extremely competitive?
Competitive keywords
She says: “Because we wanted to compete well on search engines we didn’t target words like ‘gifts’, because that’s terribly competitive - we decided to focus on [keywords that centered around] hobbies and interests so we had ‘gifts for cat lovers’, ‘gifts for gardeners’, or gifts related to cooking, and that was done to attract the traffic in.”
It worked. Between September 2008 and March 2009 traffic to the site increased by a whopping 228%. She says the combination of creating each page with SEO in mind from the start, along with an increased depth of products has led to this incredible surge in visitors.
While embarking on her first keyword research project she was surprised by the range of keywords she discovered.
“The one that always gets me is that so many searches are for ‘kids’ rather than ‘children’s’. That’s the reason why I use keyword research as a starting point because my brain is obviously geared towards the kinds of terms I am used to saying, but they don’t necessarily match with the terms my customers are using.
“If I have a simple product for which I think the title is pretty obvious, once you start searching around you find people calling things by different names and searching in different ways.
Once you get your mind around that you can pick up all the traffic you want to as internet marketing solutins.”
Seasonal keywords
As they are just one year old the team is only just learning about the trends and niche markets which they can tap into,as she explains:
“We are still learning about seasonality. We had a fantastic March and sold lots of children’s gardening tools but in April because of the school holidays, we saw a downturn in sales.
We are keeping our fingers crossed that it will come up again.”
Many young sites can find it difficult to compete with larger, richer companies - especially around those key calendar dates such as Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day.
Has she found a way around this?
“What I will be trying to do is put some seeds in now for the more competitive terms but not realistically expecting them to bear fruit for another year; but I do want to start the process.
The only way we can grab traffic through events at the moment is through AdWords or the equivalent.”
Link building
As a new site they are also placing foundation bricks on their link building strategy.
On the homepage they recently advertised a coloring-in competition for children, which came as a direct response to the increased traffic for child-related products.
She says she has used the competition to attract parents, who are her key customers, but also schools, to whom she supplies children’s cookery utensils and gardening equipment.
“We were also trying to create link bait and give schools a reason to give us a link, and that would allow parents to download the competition themselves,” .
“We have told them about the competition and even some local authorities have given us a link too.”
