The first major misconception is that SEO should be solely based on getting the highest rankings on a search engine results page (SERP) for any seemingly relevant keywords or phrases in a given market. In other words, you should strive to have your webpage rank as the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd result on the SERP for even the most obscure keywords relating to your business.
Here's the reality: you are in business to make money, not to play a 'ranking' game. Unless the keywords you are ranking highly for are search queries used by qualified prospects, high search engine listings are largely useless.
The second big misconception is that the whole point of ranking highly on a SERP is to increase traffic to your website. Again, however, getting tons of traffic to your website is useless if those web visitors do not buy anything (now or ever)! Yet, this can happen all too easily when you and/or your SEO consultant focuses on increasing the quantity, rather than quality, of your search engine traffic.
Fortunately, both these problems can be avoided by throwing away the misconceptions that the goal of SEO is getting high rankings and increasing traffic, and realizing, instead, that SEO is aimed at increasing sales and profits. Armed with this attitude you are better able to distinguish between just any keywords and the specific keywords likely to bring qualified leads to your website.
Identifying these keywords will, of course, require an ongoing analysis of keywords versus the type of traffic generated. Through trial and error, with an eye on the bottom line, you (or your SEO firm) will be able to isolate those 'money making' words and phrases on which you can now focus your SEO efforts.
A useful measure of the value of a keyword is the visitor value per keyword - in other words the value of a web visitor generated from that keyword. Visitor value or value per visitor (VPV) is defined as the average net profit per visitor. When tied to a keyword it's the VPV for a visitor who came to your website via that particular keyword. It may sound complex, but you can work this out with the help of some of the website analytics and tracking tools available today.
In fact, you might even implement a paid search marketing campaign to help identify the more valuable keywords, since the analytics provided by, for example, Google Adwords, can relatively easily yield the VPV per keyword. Just keep in mind that you are not strictly comparing 'apples to apples' when applying insights drawn from a paid search campaign to your SEO efforts.
In any case, the fact remains that unless your search engine optimization campaign is focused on boosting sales and profits, then it's ultimately useless. For that reason, SEO should not really be about accomplishing high rankings for any old keywords... it should be about getting high rankings for high VPV keywords.
Anna Johnson publishes Internet marketing newsletter, Kikabink News. Go here to get a FREE subscription to Kikabink News as well as a FREE copy of Anna's ebook, Killer Internet Marketing Tips, plus four FREE killer 60+ minute audio interviews with top Internet marketers: Killer Internet marketing tips
Tags: internet, search engine optimization, seo, keyword, search engine optimisation, e-business, high ranking, visitor value