Today’s post is courtesy of Bill Slawski. Bill is an SEO expert and founder of SEO By The Sea.

Enter Bill…

If you’re working on a startup, or even if you’ve gotten past the “start” phase, you should be spending some time working on promoting your business online. It’s been a few years since I first worked as a site designer/developer and in-house web promoter (and then SEO, when search engines started showing up) for a single business, but I’ve had the chance to work with a lot of startups since, and a lot of businesses that are learning how to bring their businesses more visibility on the Web. These are some things I’ve seen that people might ignore or miss, that can hurt how they are trying to use SEO to market their business.

Don’t Use Paid Search Traffic Numbers to Choose Organic Search Keywords

Many people may tell you that it can be helpful to use paid search to test and investigate the value of some keywords that you might want to include on your pages in an attempt to do SEO. This isn’t a bad idea, but it has some caveats that don’t always accompany that advice. One of those is that when search engines display advertisements within search results, those ads might be targeted not only to the exact keywords that a searcher typed as a query, but also to what Google refers to as “broad match” results. The ads might be within a category that matches a searcher’s query, but may not rely solely upon the terms chosen by you as an advertiser. That may mean that you may get a lot more people clicking upon your ad in search results based upon those categories than just the exact keywords that your advertisement is based upon.

On August 28th of last year, Google replaced the keyword suggestion tool that they offered with The Google Keyword Planner. The Keyword Planner now shows search volumes for keywords on an “exact match” basis, but the old suggestion tool used to show “broad match” search volumes by default, and you had to go through a couple of steps to change it to display “exact match” search volumes. This led to some confusion, and I’ve worked with more than one client who was trying to do keyword research and had gathered search volumes using the broad match numbers. It was a little heartbreaking telling someone that the search volume that they might expect to see for a particular keyword phrase wasn’t 500+ searches a month, but rather around 12 if the keyword suggestion tool was set to exact match instead of the default “broad match.” The exact match numbers are closer to what you might see in terms of search volume on the organic search results you might see at Google in organic results.

Since the switch over to the newer Keyword Planner Tool, I’ve had some people tell me that they planned keywords that they optimized pages of their site based upon the numbers of visits that they received for those terms using paid search, without realizing that the amount of traffic was for broad match advertisements based upon categories rather than the exact match numbers. Broad match ads might send 1,000 visitors to their pages, but exact match ads would likely only deliver a fraction of that amount, and so using those numbers for SEO is going to be disappointing. The Google Keyword Planner does show search volumes in exact match numbers now, and is more likely a closer reflection of the traffic that you might see if you optimize a page well for organic search and rank highly.

Don’t Write Your Website For You and Not Your Audience

Many industries use jargon that their audience members may not be aware of. Many site owners show off the features of what they offer without describing the benefits of those features to their audiences in words that the audience might use to search for them, and expect to see on a page offering those services or goods. You really need to be able to get into the heads of the people who might be most interested in what you offer, and anticipate what words they might use to find your site. The app that you offer might use cutting edge technology that no one has heard of before. The food additive you’ve created might use a scientific break-through reported in subscription-only journals. If the audience you’ve created your products for haven’t heard of those terms before, they might not find you, even if what you offer is exactly what they want.

You need to spend some time learning about who your audience is, and how they talk about the kind of products or services that you offer. Then you need to use that language on your site.

Don’t Mix Audience Messages and Confuse Visitors

A friend showed me a page on a site about financial services recently. The company behind the site is a household name, but the division of the company offering the services decided that it would be a good idea to create a site where they showed off what they offered together, even though the services were aimed at two different audiences.

One offering was personal loans, aimed at people who may have just left their parents homes, and were setting out on their own. The other offering was for business loans for people who were setting up a business, and that was targeted at a somewhat older audience. What they both shared in common was that they were both offered through the same division of the company, and so the home page for the site was focused upon both audiences, showing pictures of younger couples moving into new homes, and pictures of older people setting up offices. It gave me a headache.

The text on the page included messages about financing, but didn’t target either audience very well. I couldn’t help but think of how much stronger both messages would be if they were presented on two different sites, instead of reflecting the organization of the business.

Avoid Omnibus Services or Features Pages

It’s not unusual to run across a page on a site where site owners show off and describe all of the services that they offer together, rather than having separate pages for each service. Or that provide a list of features that their goods or service address. Separate, each of these service offerings or features would be easy to optimize a web page for, with unique titles and meta descriptions, and relevant and meaningful content and images. But when a page bundles all of those services or features together, titles and descriptions and page content tends to be more generalized and it’s much harder to optimize a page for specific services or features that people might be searching for.