Are You Siloing Your SEO Success By Keyword?

One of my SEO clients has a list of 20+ keywords that they’ve deemed their “priority keywords.” These are the keywords they agonize over from month to month—checking ranking reports, visitor reports, time spent on site, bounce rates, conversion rates and so forth. If those numbers go up then life in grand; if they dip at all it’s the end of the world. I should mention that these 20 odd keywords are fairly broad and they exist in a pretty competitive niche with a few dominant players that have been around the block once or twice when it comes to SEO—and those players don’t like giving up an inch of ground for these priority keywords.

All that being said, after about 10 months of link building my client is seeing momentum in the right direction for those keywords. A few have moved from page two to page one in Google, and just about all of them have at least moved upwards in ranking (say #23 to #18) even if they haven’t cracked the top 10 just yet. Visitors from those priority keywords (those keyword exactly mind you, not any long tail variations) are also creeping upwards while visitors from completely unrelated keywords such as “business” have almost completely vanished. All in all I’d say that my client’s priority keywords were looking pretty good. Some months my client agrees and some months they don’t (depending on the numbers), but such is the life of an SEO professional.

But even though my client’s priority keyword list is looking good, they aren’t getting nearly as excited about their SEO program as I would like them to be. Why? Because they are siloing their SEO success by keyword and not looking at the big picture. On average, I’d say this particular client has over 6,000 search queries driving traffic to their site every month. Measuring the impact of 20 priority keywords doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story and they are leaving a lot of SEO success stories on the table because of it.

For instance, let’s say I only cared about the number of visitors that found my own company website by searching for “SEO.” Now SEO is an incredibly competitive keyword and there are probably hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other companies vying for the top ten spots in Google for the same keyword. I can’t expect to get tens of thousands of visitors from one keyword, right? Especially not one as competitive as “SEO,” no matter how much search volume there is. Let’s say in any given month my site gets 210 people from “SEO.” 210 visitors from one keyword isn’t bad, but what about the 43 people my site gets from “full service SEO,” the 96 people from “white hat SEO,” or the 27 people from “B2B SEO.” That’s 166 highly targeted visitors to my site that I’m forgetting to factor into my SEO success because those keywords aren’t registering as “important” to me. Chances are that 166 visitors from those three long tail variations are actually BETTER traffic for my site because their search is more specific. Someone looking for “SEO” could be looking for a company, a consultant, an SEO training, a how-to book, or even just the definition of SEO. On the other hand, someone searching for “full service SEO” is probably looking to hire an SEO company, and that is the kind of visitor I want coming to my site in the end.

When you’re looking at the success of your SEO campaign it’s important to not silo your keywords, or at the very least be realistic about your expectations. Ask yourself—which keywords are going to help my business now? These might be the long tail versions with a lower search volume but better conversion rate. These are the keywords you can actually compete for and start owning in the SERPs. Also ask yourself, what keywords do I want to do well for down the road? These are those broad, industry specific keywords that the big players tend to dominate in your niche. You want to work those into your SEO and keep an eye on how well they are performing but don’t measure the success of your SEO solely on these keywords.

Silos are the death of any SEO campaign, especially when it comes to measuring your success. It’s important to take a step back and look at the big picture before deciding your SEO campaign did or did not work.