Serve Your Customers First : Tips for Organic SEO

Before we get into the whole "keyword research as an organic SEO technique" discussion, I suggest you take a moment and think about what you are trying to achieve.

As R L Adams notes in The SEO White Book: "Today, to rank high, Google needs to trust you." The author then goes on to point out that Google's trust is influenced by three key components:

• age - how long has your domain been online?
• authority - who else that Google already trusts thinks you are great?
• content - is the content actually relevant and useful?

Organic SEO is only really concerned with the last of these - the content. However, your authority measure will be affected by the way that you link back to your top level domain (or whatever you're trying to attract customer attention towards) and the keywords that you use in promoting it to their readers.

This last assumes that you are attempting to increase authority using researched backlinking from a higher-authority site identified by its Google PageRank, and is not in the scope of this article.

What is in scope is the organic keyword research that leads to the content used for promotion, be it on-site or off-site. And key to that process is the mantra : Serve Your Customers First.

Author Avinash Kaushik echoes this sentiment in Web Analytics 2.0 : "...if you know the source of your traffic, you can strongly infer what kinds of people are coming to your web site..."

Kaushik then goes on to reinforce this idea by pointing out that "[organic traffic] accounts for an outsized percentage of its [website traffic] multiple conversions." The book sees PPC and organic SEO as two sides of the same coin, and I tend to agree that if you have both you will reap the rewards.

However, much can be achieved by deploying organic SEO on its own, as long as you start with your customers. To do that, you'll need to dig into the traffic stats, and uncover the actual search terms that are bringing traffic to the site.

You'll begin to note that there are certain combinations of keyword phrase with action phrases that lead to sales, whereas there are some common 'research only' phrases that might bring traffic, but with a very low conversion rate.

One of the easiest ways to start making organic SEO pay its way is by using keyword research to identify keyword phrases that are already bringing in traffic, and capture an additional portion of that segment of the market that are also ready to buy.

If you can leverage your keyword research to achieve that, then you will be able to boost sales, reduce your traffic acquisition costs, and help promote your authority to Google. All of which ought to push you yo the top of the pile, ready to serve your customers better with higher quality content and relevant product offerings.

The Future of Organic SEO

I logged into my Google AdWords account the other day, and got a bit of a shock - it seems that Google is retiring their External Keyword Tool, and haven't really provisioned a replacement.

I mean, there's the Kayword Planner, but that really isn't as easy to use or as powerful as the Keyword Tool was.

Now, this article isn't going to tell you what to use instead, because there aren't really any good free replacements. If you liked the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (External) then you're going to have to put your hand in your pocket and pay for Wordtracker, or similar.

They're not paying me to say that - I mean it - but bear with me a moment, because ... it may not matter!

Recently, Wordtracker's own Mike Mindel was asked his opinion of the withdrawal of Google's tool by Brent Hodgson from Keyword Blueprint. Mindel's reply reinforced the Wordtracker line that Google's toolchain is strongly oriented towards PPC, and is, at best, inadequate for organic keyword research anyway.

And there's the rub - SEO and keyword research are as important as they ever were, but the approach needs to change. In my opinion, Mindel is only half right. Wordtracker and tools like it are only half of the answer.

It's nice to see what people are searching for, but the context shouldn't be weighted towards the volume of search requests for a two, three or four word phrase. It should be weighted towards the content that they end up looking at when they deploy those keywords in a search.

Let's trust Google to return the best quality results, while we use tools to see what keyword phrases led them to those results.

The new face of SEO is going to be (if it isn't already) geared towards creating quality content first, and then looking at the numbers later. And guess what? Google's got a tool for that; it's called Google Analytics, and my take is that a combination of content testing, post-publication tracking, and analysis of Google Analytics reports is likely to be more productive for organic SEO than the AdWords tool ever was.

Either that, or HitBox (a web counter and analytics tool from the 1990's) is going to make a comeback.