The overarching goal of SEO, including content marketing and social SEO, is to drive new, targeted visitors to your site. It’s important to remember that while more visitors are good, more targeted visitors are better. I’ve worked with some sites over the years that actually saw a slight dip in traffic during the first few months of their SEO campaign because their site wasn’t getting traffic from unrelated, generic keywords like it had before. But even though their visitor count was a little low comparatively, their conversion rate was on the up and up! And ultimately their organic visitor count recovered and grew over time, their site’s conversion rate ticking upwards as well as more and more visitors were finding their site.
Now, in your Google Analytics account it’s possible to see the conversion rate for your site as a whole, as well as for each individual keyword. On the surface this seems like a great way to measure the individual impact of each keyword - the keywords with the highest conversion rate are obviously the best/most important keywords to your SEO program and deserve the most attention. Meanwhile, underperforming keywords can be dropped and replaced. After all, keywords aren’t set in stone and a great SEO campaign evolves.
But there is one problem with using a keyword’s conversion rate to decide whether or not it is working—on paper the keyword conversion rate doesn’t tell the whole story.
Let’s assume you own a local pet store and offer pet grooming services. “Dog grooming Boston” might send 200 visitors to your site each month and 12 of them schedule an appointment directly on your website (one of your conversion metrics). That’s a 6% conversion rate, which is actually a pretty good number. But let’s say “pet store in Boston” sends 600 visitors to your site each month and 25 of them schedule an appointment to have their dog groomed or cat declawed. That’s a 4.2% conversion rate. If all you looked at was the individual keyword conversion rate than “pet store in Boston” is the weaker keyword, right? But when it comes to determining which keywords in your SEO campaign are working well you need to step back and look at the big picture.
“Pet store in Boston” might have a smaller conversion rate, but it drives three times the traffic to your site each month. Even though only 25 of them convert directly on your site, maybe another 10 call your store to schedule a pet grooming appointment. And keep in mind that some visitors might not be looking for pet grooming services at all, but need to find a local pet store that carries the brand of pet food they prefer. If your store carries that brand than chances are you’ll see them walking through your front door soon! “Pet store in Boston” is broader search term than “dog grooming Boston” because a visitor might be looking to buy a pet, some food or pet toys, at-home grooming supplies or any number of other things. Since you are a pet store that offers grooming services, chances are you still want this business, right? Pet grooming might be highly profitable but your bread and butter might be in the rest of your products.
On the other hand, someone looking for “dog grooming Boston” has a very specific goal in mind. Long tail keywords tend to have a higher conversion rate because the searcher knows exactly what they want and are closer to converting.
That’s why it’s so dangerous to silo your keyword conversion rate, or any other data about your SEO campaign for that matter. Data is only as useful as the person interpreting it. If you focused all your attention on the keyword conversion rate you might accidentally remove some keywords from your SEO campaign that were actually driving a good amount of traffic and ultimately bringing in new customers to your business.