Site Renovators Part #1 – SEO Keyword Research

This is part one in a series of posts dedicated to the Midphase Site Renovators contest in which one person won a website makeover from a group of marketing and design professionals at Midphase.

The foundation of any successful SEO campaign revolves around keyword research. With the winner of the Site Renovators contest, Hermann Communications, I reviewed their website to find out who I thought their target audience is and then used the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to discover what people are searching for and who would be looking for the services that Hermann Communications offer.

Homepage
The homepage of any website is the page that tells a visitor what the whole purpose of the website. The best strategy for the homepage is to target broad keywords that relate to the services that your business offers as a whole. In the case of Hermann Communications, keywords relating to business communications would be good to target on the homepage.
When we spoke on the phone, Mindy Hermann, the owner, told us that their primary focus is the food and nutrition industry. Since they have a landing page that already targets that market, they could add a short paragraph to highlight that as their primary focus and link to the food and nutrition landing page from that part of the homepage content.
A banner in the upper part of the homepage which includes a call to action is a good way to tell visitors what your main service is and drive targeted traffic from the homepage, to the relevant landing page.
Service Pages
The Hermann Communications website has pages dedicated to each of the services that they offer. I was able to review the content on each of these landing pages and find relevant keywords to target on those pages. They keywords that I recommended are the following:

• Food & Nutrition Communications: Nutrition communications was not a popular search term so I recommended health communications or food and health communications as alternatives.
• Public Relations: Good keywords for this page are anything relating to public relations strategies and writing.

• Nutrition Analysis: Keywords relating food and nutrition analysis are ideal keywords for this landing page.
• Recipe Development and Food Labeling: These two landing pages are pretty targeted and match up well with the most relevant keywords to the landing page.
• Website Design: After talking with Eric, who heads up the web design services that they offer, we determined that website design as a keyword is pretty broad for them. They focus mainly on designing sites for businesses and professionals in the food and nutrition industry so more relevant keywords for this page are terms like food website design and food web design. Another good keyword is WordPress website design since their designs mostly use WordPress.
• Website Maintenance: This landing page is also pretty well targeted and any website maintenance keywords would be good to target. Since they specialize in WordPress, this landing page could also target WordPress related website maintenance terms.

 
As mentioned earlier, the key to a successful SEO campaign is in the keyword research. You need to choose keywords that are most relevant to your industry and make sure they are mapped to relevant landing pages. This will give your website a better chance at ranking in the search results pages and bring the most targeted traffic to your website. The end result will be lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates and better search engine rankings.

About the Author: Dustin Williams is a Search Engine Marketing expert and the Global SEO Manager for MidPhase, a domain registration and website hosting services provider. He has been practicing SEM and optimizing websites since 2004. Follow Dustin on Twitter: @WebGazelle.