Do You Know WHO And WHAT Your Potential Customers Search For?

A fundamental job for anyone responsible for marketing is to understand your customer and to make sure that the marketing tools you use speaks to the customer in their language. However, on the web marketing has an added dimension – the website first has to be found! For the SEO professional understanding the keywords and phrases that a potential visitors users is critical to search engine optimisation. On the web this is called search engine marketing and is fundamental to every search engine optimisation strategy. Once you grasp how the potential customers searches for your product or service, you can more effectively reach and keep these visitors. There are three main types of searches:

Navigational searches. This is when a user types in a specific website URL. Depending on the type of website, these searches can lead to some high conversion rates.

Informational Searches. This is when users are researching or checking out some information such as local weather, directions or film. Informational searches involve a huge range of research involving any product or service. Note that here there is general low commercial intention.

Transactional Searches. This can involve finding a local restaurant, making a purchase online or completing a task such as opening an account such as photoprinting. Transactional searches have the high commercial value.

It is really valuable to analyse not just the keywords or phrases that a potential visitor to your website uses but the commercial intention. Whilst for a PPC campaign you’ll want to target and test out the phrases with the highest commercial intention (after all you’re paying for each click whether it converts or not) with search engine optimisation you will also want to target informational queries. These are likely to generate more traffic to your site and will be less competitive than high commercially intent phrases. Whilst this aspect of keyword research can be done yourselves an SEO professional will inevitably will have some of the SEO tools and experience to help you ‘jump start’ and monitor this process.