Small Business Marketing Blog

Inbound Marketing: Why Keyword ‘Rank’ Shouldn’t be Your Goal

I sat in on a webinar recently by Hubspot, explaining keywords and how to use their keyword grader to determine the best keywords for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy.

A lot of my recent projects have involved helping businesses determine the best keywords and SEO strategies and tactics. One of the things that was brought up in this webinar is ‘rank’ shouldn’t be your goal. Your goal is to get visits to your site and convert the visits to leads. A high rank in Google can lead to more visits but it isn’t a goal.  And it is better to focus on a keyword that is highly relevant than one that has high volume.

A keyword that is highly relevant  to your product or service offering will yield a higher number of conversions. And this is why:

Let’s say you choose a keyword that has high search volume and you spend a lot of time creating great content around that keyword and eventually start to rank in Google’s top 10.  If that keyword is not highly relevant to your product or service offering, your prospects will do one of two things:

1. Click on your site, and then leave because it’s not what they’re looking for, or
2. They won’t even click on your site at all.
Think about another scenario where you focus on a keyword that is highly relevant.  Even if it has a low monthly search volume if it is highly relevant to your product or service offering chances are the prospect will click on your site. 

Now the challenge is to convert this website visitor into a lead. This is achieved through:

1. Knowing the keywords your prospects are using
2. Understanding their challenges, frustrations, needs
3. Writing content that appropriate based on the above two points
4. Having a conversion tactic on the page
5. And making sure it is clear to visitor what they need to do next

Hopefully this blog article has helped you see that 'ranking' for a particular keyword is not a 'business' goal. And that focusing on relevancy and conversion strategies is what you need to do to acheive your business objectives.

Do you have any questions? Think you need to spend some more time on:

1. Choosing the right keywords for your business?
2. Content strategies?
3. Lead conversation strategies?
4. A complete website analysis?

If so, the first place to start is identifying the right keywords.

To find out how we can help, check out our Keyword / SEO Starter Package.