Adapting keywords to draw in a wider demographic

It's one of the most widely used search keywords in history; the word 'online'.

Just as many search terms can be broken down to a narrow focus (if you're searching for 'home loans', it's pretty obvious what you're looking for), the word 'online' is a wide open field. Which makes it very important as a keyword in your website content.

Think about it for a second; let's say you have a website that offers free DVDs to people in return for them filling out surveys. Obviously anyone looking up 'free DVDs' in Google will likely find your website pretty quickly, but how many people are actually making that search? According to Overture, just 17,174 people.

Now, that's a decent amount of searches, to be sure, but at the same time, 163,634 people are looking up "download free DVD movie, " which means if the guy who owns FreeDVDs.com wants to get 10 times the traffic, he needs to mention the words "download free DVD movie" somewhere on his page.

He might go about that like so:

Some people think the only way to get a free DVD movie is to download it, but that's no longer the case!

Bingo - suddenly both searches will now bring up this website as an option.

But let's take things a step further. The word 'online' is a hugely popular search phrase, and it's usually associated with a wide array differing terms. For example, the top search that includes the word 'online' is 'online degree', with over 4.8m searches per month . So if FreeDVDs.com included those words in the content, they could expect an even bigger increase in search engine-induced traffic.

Along similar lines, 'online dating' brings about 3.1m searches per month, and 'online games' racks up 1.5m ('free online games' adds another million to that number).

So if we wanted to adapt those keywords into the text, we might write something like:

We live in an incredible technological age; online dating, online degrees, online games, and much of it is free! But while some people think the only way to get a free DVD movie is to download one illegally, thankfully that's no longer the case!

Now, with the addition of those keywords to the text of this website, we've just added a potential new customer base of over 10m new searches per month!

The potential downside:
The problem with casting a wider traffic net is, as it always has been and always will be, that you might bring in people who have no interest in your product. These people will increase your bandwidth costs, they'll slow down the site, and they'll be annoyed if they think they were brought in under sneaky circumstances.

With this in mind, we encourage people to only use search phrases that you think are close to your own product in terms of customer interest. Clearly if someone is looking for a free video game online, they'll be interested in hearing about a free DVD. The online degree, on the other hand, might be a stretch. So too would 'online banking'. The best course is to use your common sense, be creative, but always remember that traffic isn't worth nearly as much when it's annoyed with you.

posted by Oz @ 1:17 PM