Locking In on Keywords - Beyond Keyword Optimization
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Beyond Keyword Optimization By Rob Schmults
The rate of change online used to be fun. Now, the cutting edge is no longer the target: increasing your ROI is.
Chasing the cutting edge was an exciting occupation with limited accountability. But now ROI, quarterly budgets and the need to grow sales AND profits, have replaced the cutting edge as the object of our efforts. Yet, despite the transition to more traditional business goals and outcomes, the rate of change remains the same.
Take keyword buys. This is still a relatively new phenomena, and many businesses are only just beginning to develop an approach to extract the benefits. Nevertheless, returns have already been compressed as the cost of keywords has quickly been bid up to their marginal rates of return - and on some case beyond. The ease with which results can be tracked has allowed the market to be extremely efficient in pricing keywords, making it harder and harder for the buyers of words to generate a return.
Pockets of gold still exist. Keywords that have been overlooked by competitors can still produce outsized returns. But these pockets will only shrink over time as more buyers enter the market chasing the same end customers.
To continue to extract vale from keywords, marketers are going to have to turn inward. For most companies, getting the traffic is seen as the whole of the equation. But just as important is what you do with the traffic. So even as we are only starting to get the hang of keyword buys, we need to tackle landing page optimization.
To date, landing page optimization has been too hard and too expensive to generate a return. But with the returns on keywords contracting and the advent of new optimization tools, the math behind such efforts looks better every day.
Choosing Keywords 
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