I have been blogging about keyword research, and keyword "efficiency" in particular. This week I want to take a break from that series to write about a rough and ready method for quickly identifying profitable opportunities in an existing website's keyword strategy by looking at a case study.
A couple buddies of mine own and operate one of the biggest and most respected manufacturer of locksmith supplies in the US, and while I was digging around in their traffic and ranking data I happened upon a simple opportunity—one keyword target that could represent thousands of sales for them. Here's how it all went down.
By far, their highest performing keyword is "locksmith supplies". It may not be the most efficient all things being equal, but it is a high performer for their site in particular. Namely, of the set of all keywords whose monthly visits are over 10 and whose average pages per visit are over 12, traffic from this KW comprises the 3rd highest percentage of new visitors behind “locksmith supplies online” and “key blanks wholesale”. Of the same set, "locksmith supplies" generates the most amount of traffic, at more than double the second place keyword
So, out of curiosity I took this set of wholesale locksmith-related keywords, and whipped up an impromptu efficiency metric for them. I assigned a value to each word in the list based on a function of visits, pages per visit, average time on site, percentage of new visits, and bounce rate.
Performing keyword research on existing sites can fine-tune your strategy and raise your profits, because you have access to more metrics.
In this case, I doubled the traffic since it’s the most important of the values, took the inverse of the bounce rate since a lower rate is better, and 10% of the average time on site, pages per visit, and percentage of new visits, and multiplied all of the values together. The formula is pretty rough and very subjective because I weighted each value according to how important I guessed them to be, just off the cuff, and different ways of calculating efficiency would yield different results altogether.
That said, it was a very quick way of ordering a list of keywords to determine which ones to pay more attention to. “Locksmith supplies” was almost triple in its efficiency over “locksmith supplies online”. That was almost exclusively due to its much larger traffic volume, however I was able to confirm that it didn’t just bring in more traffic, it wasn't worthless by other methods of evaluation.
Sometimes we find keywords that look good from one angle but are worthless because of something else we failed to take into account.
There was also synergy among some of the top keywords. The second and third place phrases contained this one in them, the fifth place phrase was a conjugation of it, and the rest, save one, contained the CLK brand name.
So this warranted further investigation. I took the average number of hits per day that CLK garnered from this keyword, found its ranking, and used clickthrough rate (CTR) figures to triangulate how many hits it would receive if it were to rank first in Google. As far as I know there are only two places to get CTR data, and so I ran the numbers using both of them in turn. I will talk more about CTR in future posts.
From there all I had to do was chop the additional traffic volume down by the percentage of hits that would likely convert to sales, and voila! I had a projection of how many additional sales CLK Supplies could make by further optimizing their website for locksmith supplies.
But there was another approach to calculating that same figure that I wanted to try. Instead of taking their existing traffic data and using it to determine the traffic they could get for position 1 in Google, I looked up traffic volume data for the keyword (first using the WordTracker number, and then again using the Google Traffic Estimator figure) and use it to estimate their potential traffic volume instead.
It turned out that, any way you slice it, bumping this keyword up in the search engine results pages (SERPS) just a two positions could represent thousands more sales per year for my client. In a matter of minutes we were able to identify an accessible keyword target that could bring in a substantial return on investment.
The moral of the story is that keyword research needs to be done more than once. Ongoing research functions much like a sluice, filtering gold from the gravel so that you know how to really cash in on your SEO efforts.
For those interested, the star product that CLK Supplies sells is something they actually invented, called "Aerokey Software". It solves a problem often faced by locksmiths doing complex lock pinning. When a locksmith needs to key an apartment, school, church, office, or other group of related rooms and buildings, for which the client needs or would like a master key as well as manager and worker keys, it involves a significant amount of math (as you can imagine!). With CLK's locksmithing software, all of the work is done for the end user, even showing them a pinning chart, specifying the sizes needed!
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