When we re-designed TheHairbowCompany.com for The Hairbow Company over the summer, we saw a whole lot of opportunity for SEO improvements. Since then, we’ve done some competitor-focused keyword research, identified a number of high-potential keywords, and began bulking up content surrounding the keywords we found. The results are convincing: Content matters.
Keyword Research
It’s easy to be overwhelmed when diving into keyword research. One excellent way to focus your efforts is to find where you’re losing to competitors, and start there. That’s what we did with The Hair Bow Company, and it gave us an excellent starting point for our SEO strategy.
After finding which keywords they shared with a major competitor, we focused in on the keywords where they were losing. Once we had the losing keywords, we focused down even more on keywords that received a fair amount of search volume, and removed keywords that were vague, or irrelevant to products sold by The Hairbow Company.
This left us with a list of 28 keywords to focus on. It should be noted that you can learn much more from competitor data than what we pulled in this initiative. Looking at the keywords you’re NOT overlapping on can provide insight, as well as investigating which keywords you’re winning on. This project represents just a small portion of what you can learn from these data sets.
Informing Your Content Strategy
The keyword research is just the first phase in our SEO efforts. With our focus dialed in, it was time to get to work.Our first few months have been spent writing descriptions for every category page, with keywords found in the competitor analysis informing our content.
Again, there are many ways to shape your content initiatives. The key is to use research to focus your efforts so that you can begin a concerted effort to make measurable improvements.
Following Up with SEO Reporting
This is a frequently overlooked portion of SEO. Too often, we find people dumping a ton of effort into writing category descriptions, product descriptions, and blog posts, but they never follow up with the reporting that tells them how effective their labor has been!
SEO, for all the analysis and science we apply to it, still comes down to a game of fine adjustments. Testing, evaluation, and re-working your site is the only true way to make consistent gains in an increasingly competitive space. That’s why, every month, we re-evaluated those 28 keywords. Here’s what we learned:
On-Site Content Works
At a time when everyone is doing their best to write blog posts and build infographics that garner massive audiences, it’s easy to overlook the importance of getting relevant, unique, and informative content onto the pages your customers visit most. By adding a hundred words per category, and keeping in mind which keywords you’re targeting with your initiatives, you can gain the attention of search engines indexing your pages. We ran a report to identify where our high value keywords ranked every month and plotted our movement over time:
The keywords that were ranking up around 100 in August were likely not ranking at all for The Hairbow Company, today they are on the first and second pages and we’re still building more supporting content.
It’s interesting to not that, when you go from not ranking at all, to ranking well, Google will often bounce your rankings around a bit before settling in a bit. We’re expecting this graph to have more ups and downs over time, with the overall trend to be towards better rankings.
But keyword rankings still don’t provide the full picture. Are these keywords bringing traffic to your site? And if so, is that traffic converting? While it’s difficult to get data on how traffic from specific keywords performs, we can see that the Hair Bow Company’s organic traffic since August has nearly doubled compared to 2015, and that the organic conversion rate is nearly as high as its direct traffic conversion rate – indicating relevant searches and quality users.
SEO Strategies With IntuitSolutions
You don’t need to go it alone when it comes to SEO. Partnering with experts gives you a full team of professionals who can analyze, research, and implement strategies that will improve your traffic using a variety of methods and metrics.
Our plans range from basic reporting and consulting to strategy implementation, User Experience upgrades, and paid marketing efforts. Every portion of our strategy focuses on the ultimate goal of improving your revenue and generating measurable returns on your advertising investments. Call us today to learn more about how we structure our work, and how we can begin working on your site to achieve lasting results.
