It seems like a simple concept, but you don’t see it discussed much on the SEO forums and blogs all that often. I venture to guess it’s because if people are given a choice – pay now or pay later, most people will choose the latter. Matt McGee at SEL wrote what seemed to be yet another Top 20 list, but while reading I saw 2 excellent points that caught my eye.
1 – Have analytics in place at the start:
It always surprises me how many clients I speak with who don’t have analytics installed or don’t utilize what they have. Look at it this way – the NBA draft is tonight, do you think that the team executives would show up at the draft without any stats about the prospective players? Something tells me they do just a little bit of statistical and game tape analysis before they decide who to draft.
2 – Open up a PPC account
Anyone who asks me about starting SEO, I tell them the same thing. Find out now what your site should be optimized for. Start a paid search campaign. Don’t spend weeks, months, and resources optimizing for something you have no idea whether it will convert. In fact, let’s kill 2 birds with one stone, Google Adwords offers Google Analytics to anyone with an account. They’re both ‘free’. Sign up and take advantage, please!
I absolutely 100% guarantee there is no one in the world who can tell you what your best converting keyword will be before you actually start getting search engine traffic. Be patient, spend a month running a small campaign in paid search, you will learn a lot about your site and your product/service in that time.
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Some clients focus so much on certain keywords because they assume that these words will convert. I can always see the shock on their face when we get to actually look at the analytics data. It is like you said, be patient and let the data guide you.