There is no one that knows more about the work you do than the people inside your company. To attract new customers, you need to get the word out and one way to do that is to be found on search engines. It’s estimated that on Google alone there are between 55-65,000 search queries each second. It only makes sense that your prospects will be using Google at some point in their decision process, so your job is to be among the top results that Google shows when someone searches, right?
The problem is you know too much about your own products and services to be a good judge of what your prospects are searching for and what stage they are in when they use the search engines. Let me give you one anecdote. We worked with a clothing company that sold beachwear, specifically Hawaiian type shirts. They weren’t technically Hawaiian shirts, more a brightly colored camp shirt, just so you have an image in mind of what their main product was. The main term anyone could imagine a potential customer of these shirts searching for was, naturally, Hawaiian Shirts. A lot of work went into optimizing for anything around that term and after enough results came in, we had no real results. To boost traffic, we started purchasing ads on these search terms because they needed traffic and sales. After a few months of running ads, we had enough traffic to analyze what people were searching for immediately before they purchased their shirts, their last-click before purchase. The results showed the number one term was tropical shirt/tropical shirts. About one in three clicks was a purchase. Hawaiian shirts was well down the list. It provided the most traffic but the fewest sales. The weird thing was Hawaiian shirt, singular, was the absolute worst performing term. Hundreds of clicks, not one sale.
