Visibility

It has been said that the aim is more important than the bow and arrow in archery. The bow and arrow are only instruments, while the aim is the skill. When it comes to aim, it is all about accuracy and good judgment.  A good bow and arrow set can be purchased. A good aim cannot be purchased. If we draw an analogy towards our online marketing efforts, we could say content accuracy and quality is similar to aim. Targeting a key segment with the right content has become increasingly vital not only in search results, but conversions to sales. Yet, so many online marketers have big issues with their content. They sometimes get blinded by concentrating on traffic numbers and Web rankings, and forget about what the user wants. In most cases people come to the Web for three basic things:
1.    To be entertained
2.    To socialize
3.    To find information
The search for information is sometimes difficult for users. Depending on the subject, they often run into a lot of noise on a search engine like Google. Recently, there has been considerable focus on improving search results accuracy by Google. Why? The answer is simple. Users have become increasingly frustrated during their search, only to find non-informative retailers, content farms, and Wikipedia constantly appearing in their search while they are looking for quality information. As a result, they have abandoned Google and left for other search tools. As the search giant becomes more geared towards indexing accuracy, were does that leave you as an online marketer? In short, the byproduct of search engine accuracy can easily be translated into quality traffic to our websites. This leaves us with an opportunity to improve the conversion to sales.

One-Million or One-Thousand
Which would you rather have?...A website that generates one-million visitors with a 1% conversion, or a website with one-thousand visitors with a 20% conversion? Both sites can generate a similar amount in sales dollars. However, the million-visitor site with the high volume traffic is going to have a tremendous amount of traffic overhead. This will cost server infrastructure resources. It also results in customer service answering lots of inquiries from people who are searching for something else, but came across your closely related offerings. In the end, they do not buy from you, but ask you where they can find it. So, it is not always about getting tons of traffic. It is about getting the right visitors connected with the right information on the right website. It is about site content accuracy. This is where the narrowly targeted, low maintenance thousand-visitor site shines in higher conversion. When we give a customer exactly what they want, they will often buy. In fact, customers only seek two things: Solutions to their problems, and good feelings. Trust and credibility create good feelings.

Sharing the Responsibility of Accuracy
When most users use Google, Bing or Yahoo, they will often perform their search in the “Web” category of the search engine. There are other search categories such as “Images”, “Videos”, and “Shopping”. Each category gives a different result when searched. For example, if you search for “chainsaw oils” under “Images” you will see a variety of things. They include images of chainsaw oil cans and oil being poured into chainsaws. However, we also see something completely unrelated to chainsaw oils. They include part diagrams and saw sharpening. If we drill down on the parts diagram image, we might find a website that has nothing to do with chainsaw oils. Rather, we might see a website that offers chainsaw repair manuals and repair diagrams. If we go to the top of Google and select the category of “Shopping” we would see a listing of many sites that sell chainsaw oil. In addition, there might be a spouted fuel/oil can that shows up. Many feel that these are examples of inaccuracy with the search engine. The search engine engineers will sometimes claim they were not given enough information by the user or the website. What is the point to be made here with these slight inaccuracies in the categories? The point is this: Accuracy is a shared responsibility between both the search engine and a website’s design. While we cannot address the inaccuracies of the search engine, we can focus on the accuracy of our own websites.

If we can get the right information to the right user, then our website traffic is better qualified. Once we have qualified visitors, our odds of a sales conversion increase dramatically. Let us now take a look at a couple of optimization techniques that focus on content accuracy…which generates income!

Payday Secret #1: Category Leveraging
As a user, perhaps the most difficult category to find information related to your search is in the “Web” category of the search engine. This is the default category that comes up first when we visit a search engine. As a result, it gets the majority of traffic. The problem with this setup is everyone expects virtually everything to show up in this category. As a result, we now have a multi-billion dollar SEO/SEM industry that fights to have every client appear on the first page of the “Web” category. In the meantime, other search categories get less attention. As a Web marketer, this can be to your advantage. Getting top ranking in other search categories can be a real payday. If you are a retailer on the Web, and your site is built upon the shopping cart, then you should absolutely have a presence in the “Shopping” category of the search engine. Most retail sites are focused on product listings within the store, and not information about a particular subject. Yet many retail websites spend their SEO/SEM efforts on the “Web” category. Remember, this is the category for information, not necessarily shopping. At this point, you are leaving the heavy lifting to the search engine to classify your content correctly. This is part of the accuracy issue we described earlier. As a rule of thumb, make your site easy to categorize by the search engine. Category leveraging is often over looked by online marketers. Getting listed in the proper category improves accuracy of search engine information, and drives better qualified traffic to your website. So, if you have an information site, then the proper SEO/SEM focus is on the “Web” category. If you have a website with heavy visual information, then the proper SEO/SEM focus is on the “Images” category. If you have a sight containing videos about a specific subject, the SEO/SEM focus should be on the “Videos” category.

Payday Secret #2: Key Messages
Many promotional campaigns over the years have used an old game based on the question, “What’s the phrase that pays?” This same question can also be applied in our Web marketing efforts. There is often an over emphasis on identifying keywords to be used on your site for search engine food. In the past, this worked fine. However, as search engines focus more on the next level of content accuracy, using key messages in your category identification is very important. If you are targeting the “Images” category, image tags can leverage a message like “Photo of an LED flashlight” versus just keywords like “LED flashlight” in the image tag. The message makes the search engine know a couple of things:
1.    This is an actual photo. Otherwise any JPEG or GIF could merely be an image of the textual word flashlight or some other misrepresentation of an LED light.
2.    There is more information to confirm the image content. Hence, this is getting things to a higher degree of accuracy about the content.
This principle can be applied to any category in the search engine. For the “Web” category, tag lines that begin with “Information about [subject]” or “Facts about [subject]”. Again, we are confirming this is information related content, which fits perfectly in the “Web” category.

Hopefully, these two points of optimization will arm you with a higher degree of content accuracy. It also gives a path to leveraging the categorization of your website. In the end, it is an improvement in the organic creation of better qualified traffic that yields an increase in the percentage of conversion to website sales.