Lab Report: Optimizing Your Site for a Particular Keyword

Keywords are a much-misunderstood subject in SEO, and one of the areas of greatest confusion is the idea of optimizing for a particular keyword.

You can certainly do it. In an earlier post, Organize a Keyword Campaign, I explained how to do this, and announced that we would be working on the new keyword “worksheet” for our lab site, FreshPlans.

That was March 23rd and it’s now April 21st, so it has been just about a month. We haven’t been aggressive about this effort; we have not, in fact, increased the amount of time we put into work on the site (about an hour a day). We’ve just been working on “worksheet” along with our other chosen keywords. Specifically, I added a page titled “Worksheets,” I used the term slightly more often (once a week rather than twice a month), and spent an hour on linkbuilding for the term.

Because we had an extreme spike in traffic at the end of March, we’re comparing March 1-21, before we added “worksheet” to our list of desired keywords, with April 1-21, after we did so.  We’ve had a 316.67% increase in visits from people using the term “worksheet.”

Our overall traffic is up by a bit more than 67%, so we can see that the increase for “worksheet” is significantly greater than the general increase for the same period of time.

How about rankings? We are nowhere on the front page of the search results for “worksheet.” We don’t expect to be any time soon. The sites on that page are much larger, older, better funded, and more filled with worksheets than our site is, and we don’t deserve to be on the front page.

Notice that it doesn’t matter. We had 12 visitors a week looking for worksheets before we began our gentle little campaign, and 50 a week afterwards. If we continue, we can expect to see more results. If we were selling worksheets, this would make a difference for our business.

We’re preparing to do just this for one of our clients. He’s doing well with the first set of keywords we worked on for him and he’s ready to add another set. It’s an affordable step for him to take in his business — the equivalent in cost of one small newspaper ad, and the results will last far more than one day.

Consider doing this for your business, too. If you want specifics, check out the post I’ve linked to above. If you don’t have the time or the skills, call Rosie at 318.572.6002 and get on our calendar.


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