Blog | Internet Marketing Experts

Buy Keywords vs. Research Keywords – Search Intent

I was recently helping a CA firm optimise their web site and found that they were focussing on selling a service – “register a company in Singapore” – on a page targetting a research-intent keyword – “doing business in Singapore”. This clear mismatch in search intent and page copy set me thinking and hence this post.

While there is no black and white separation between the buy-intent and research-intent search keywords, you can guess the real purpose of the searcher most of the time. In the above case, the people who search for “doing business in Singapore” want to learn about the benefits and challenges associated with doing business there. Of course, they will need to register a company also but they are not looking for a vendor to do this at the moment.

So it might be better to provide information about all the aspects of doing business in Singapore, tax laws, business environment, HR issues, market scenario etc. You can ask them to sign-up for your newsletter or invite to download a white-paper on this topic to stay in touch with them.

Build another page focussed on “register a company in Singapore” wherein you can provide the details of your service, cost, timelines etc. This will serve the people who have already done their research and are ready to register a company and start operating.

What is the search intent for these terms: “good car for city driving”, “Honda City price”, “new properties in Kolkata”, “rent for 3-BHK flat in Urbana”?

A good matching of search intent with the landing page copy will get much better ROI on your ad-spend.

Have you analysed your different ad campaigns and checked whether the landing pages match the search intent and carry relevant information and matching Calls-to-Action (CTA)?

Faster Websites Get More Business

What do you do when you come across a slow loading website? Get frustrated, click the BACK button and visit another site, right? Your prospects are also doing the same on your site.

A fast web site is very important in today’s world as people are getting more and more restless. Google has openly declared that it is rewarding faster websites with improved ranking. Users also stay longer on fast loading sites and this increases the chances that they will see more pages and hopefully, more of them will submit a quote request or buy stuff.

There are several ways to get your web site to load faster. Most of these are highly technical in nature. However, I will give you the ideas in a more friendly language:

Get a faster web host

One of the key factors in your site being slow is a weak web hosting company. The company may have an under-rated server and loaded several domains on the same server putting it under stress. You might need to invest a little more but it is important to work with a good, business class hosting company.

Improve the page design

If your site uses lots of javascript and CSS files, it will be slow. These files take time to be downloaded and understood by the browsers like Chrome, Firefox etc. You need to reduce the number of such files and optimise where possible.

Image files

Many designers upload large image files, generally shot on a high resolution camera. These large files are not needed on the computer or mobile of the users. Reducing the image dimension (pixels) can improve the file size. We can also reduce the resolution of the image to make it smaller without compromising the visual quality. These 2 techniques can be combined to make the image file size much smaller, thereby making it download faster and show up quicker.

Technical Adjustments

There are several other technical adjustments like preconnecting to some 3rd party servers, eg., Google Analytics, reordering file sequence etc that be applied to make the site load faster.

We have improved the loading speed for several sites and have seen a tangible improvement in the rankings as well as response rate. One site’s home page which loaded in 9 secs before optimisation now loads in 4.6 secs. This type of improvement become even more important when the user access your site through a mobile phone because these are generally less powerful than a desktop.

If you want a free assessment of your web site’s speed improvement potential, contact us here and we will send you a no-obligation proposal within 2 business days (generally much sooner).

Google Analytics – KPIs for Quick Wins

Do you use Google Analytics on your website? Do you regularly see the stats and identify KPIs which will help you make quick wins?

I have listed a few areas which I watch regularly for identifying ideas to improve my results.

Most visited pages

I give the maximum attention to the top 10 (or 20) most popular pages on the site. Each of the these pages should load fast and have a low bounce rate. Open the page in your browser and watch it load.

• Does the page load fast enough?

• Does the key message (the main headline) show up quickly? Is this easy to understand for the target prospect?

• Does the content flow nicely?

• Are you invited to click on a link or button to explore more details or taken to a contact form?

Make suitable changes and mark this page for regular monitoring. If you want, you can create a copy and run a split test to see if the changes will improve the response rate.

Most popular landing pages

The landing page is where the prospect first enters your site. Some people see the home page first. Others land on a different page when they come through organic search or a paid campaign.

You need to study the user experience (UX) on entering this page directly.

While auditing, you need to watch for a few things:

1. The prospect has not seen the home page or other pages before this. So the message on this page should portray the complete picture. Provide enough details here or have links where more information can be obtained.

2. This page should have very focussed content that is in alignment with the subject and the ad campaign. If there is a disconnect with the user expectations, she may leave quickly without taking any action.

Most popular devices

You need to find out which devices (desktop, mobiles or tablets) are used to access the site and in what proportion. If lots of users are accessing your site through a mobile, you need to make sure that the site renders well on these devices. Otherwise, there will be a high bounce rate for such devices.

Most popular screen resolutions

I find this very important and largely ignored by the site mangers. In one of the client sites, I found that 360×480 is the most used screen resolution and the site looks terrible on that screen size. As expected there was a very high bounce rate for such screens.

To test the rendering on different screen sizes, you can use Chrome DevTools (press F12 on Windows computers) and click on the 2nd icon from left in the menu row. At the top, you can choose custom to enter your desired screen size.

Applying these tips will help you uncover several opportunities for improving the site conversion rate and generate more leads from the same ad spend.