Darby Sieben -

Keyword relevance is another buzz word floating around the Internet by search engine optimization companies. This is almost as annoying as the ridiculous stat that these same companies when taking about 95% of web users find what they are looking for using the top 8 of 10 search engines.

Let me clarify, I use search engines as part of all my client’s Internet Marketing strategies, however, the stupidity of the stat referred to above is “what does that mean?”. If a user is looking for porn, paris hilton, tsunami relief, etc. does this really impact your business? When evaluating the usage of search engines it is critical to look at your customers and their consumption of Internet search.

Considering keyword relevance, I have had discussions with local companies in Calgary who are part of the home renovations industry who signed contracts with SEO companies for broad keyword searches such as “flooring”, “renovations”, etc. Unless you are a national player, broad searches such as “flooring” or “renovations” do your business no good. This business should have narrowed their results to “calgary flooring” or “calgary renovations” when putting together a campaign on Google.

The problem with doing this is the amount you are going to spend will be dramatically lower than those broad searches and depending on how your SEO company charges for their services this could be mean a lot less money for them.

The other point of relevance is the fact that many SEO companies completely disregard online directories such as YellowPages.ca or SuperPages.ca in Canada. As Internet Marketers this completely amazing me why they would convince a local business in Calgary to spend thousands of dollars on search engine optimization and completely leave online directories out of the mix.

Let me explain. I am going to make the assumption that the business who purchase keywords in Google or hires a search engine optimization company is interested in capturing those people when they are looking for their products or services, correct? So, if the 4 million Canadians who use YellowPages.ca and 2 million Canadians who use SuperPages.ca, per month, go into those directories and type “renovations” as the category and “calgary” as the city, would this not be considered a good keyword?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Directory and Yellow Pages Advertising, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.