Beyond Keyword Optimization

The rate of change online used to be fun. 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 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 key words has quickly
been bid up to their marginal rates of return - and in 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 value 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 everyday.

To date, most companies purchasing keywords have to settle with
dropping a potential customer off at the home page. In some
cases, they can send them to a category level page or to a
particular product page. Going beyond this to a more customized
landing page that better matches the keyword is simply too
taxing in terms of time, people, and money. Simply getting the
requisite page changes through IT is often a sufficient barrier
in and of itself.

But solutions exist for these problems. Services like Offermatica
( http://www.offermatica.com ) from Fort Point and Optimost
( http://www.optimost.com ) offer tools that allow marketers and
merchants to cost-effectively manipulate a page to reflect any
number of necessary variants. Now a home page can show language
and featured products that clearly tie to the keyword that
brought a potential customer to the site. Even product level
pages can be improved, be it through highlighting particularly
relevant product features, adjusting pricing and promotion, or
showing related products -- all of which tie back to the source
keyword.

In the case of Offermatica, the tool works as a hosted
application. Portions of a page are defined as "mBoxes" that
are then filled based on the keyword source. The content can
be anything you would normally put on a web page - text,
images, links, forms, etc. Because it is a hosted application,
it bypasses the need for internal IT while providing the
responsiveness needed to keep up with rapidly changing marketing
requirements. And best of all, both Offermatica and Optimost are
priced as a service - eliminating both difficulty and cost as an
excuse for doing nothing.

Keywords - at least the ones that work - are not going to get any
cheaper. They will remain a valuable tool for driving qualified
traffic. But increasingly buying the right ones will only be the
first step. Generating a return on the resulting traffic through
landing page optimization will be the key to continuing to
generate positive returns.

Rob Schmultz, Independent Online Selling Consultant