Readymade furnishings: how do you rate this keyword phrase? Is the phrase popular? How many people search the phrase? These questions came up when I had a chance visit to my friend’s place. She was optimizing web content for one of her clients who dealt in readymade furnishings business. She was thorough in her work – the title, the meta tags, the headline, the alt tags, the keyword-rich contents, and so on. Yet the traffic was thin, ranking less than satisfactory and conversion to sales poor.

Since she evidently knew the basics of optimizing page-content, I started on a cautious note. On the face of it, ‘readymade furnishings’ seemed a good-enough phrase to describe her client’s business. I began by asking if she looked at the log files. Did she know how many visitors are coming, the keywords used, the pages visited most and so on? I was in for surprise. She hadn’t checked the logs, in fact she didn’t know that the logs tell a good story about a website, and an unbiased one.

I didn’t guess a bigger surprise awaited me shortly. Coming away from the logs, I decided to find out how popular her keyword phrase is in terms of number of pages in search results. This was the minimum I could do on a friendly call. She typed readymade furnishings in Google for a broad search for the term. More than 350,000 pages came up in search results. Not bad I thought. But there were just about 3 sponsored links (AdWords ads) on the first page and none in subsequent pages.

With a frown I took it that there wasn’t much longing for the search term. This does happen at times. So I asked her to go for phrase search, this time typing readymade furnishings within quotes (inverted commas). The search threw up only 506 results with no sponsored ads whatsoever. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Looking at her I blurted out, how did she get the keyword!

Why, wasn’t the keyword an automatic choice for the business? But, did she search for keyword phrases? To my utter amazement, she didn’t. Although she had heard about it, she never thought keyword search was necessary. On top of that, she had no idea where and how to search for relevant keywords. I probed a little more, and out came her admission that she never felt the need for keyword research because ‘she had always known what the keywords would be’.

The fallacy

Many like my friend believe they know their keywords simply from the nature of a business. The truth is they don’t. How to explain that? If you do a broad search for the term readymade furnishings, the results will show all pages that contain both the words even though they may be appearing wide apart from one another. In fact, most results on the first page concern anything but readymade furnishings. This proves that the term is not a popular keyword at all. A phrase search bears this out.

When I pointed this out to my friend, she appeared a bit indignant, but nevertheless went along with my logic. What about home furnishings, I asked. She nodded yes. We found home furnishings much better than readymade furnishings, but still a broad and competitive term.

Preliminary keyword search

At this point I suggested that she try some free keyword research tools and start with a few seed words. Fabric, curtain and silk are some seed words that aptly described her client’s business. We went to Overture Keyword Selector Tool and then to Google’s AdWords Keywords Tool.

A whole world of likely keyword phrases opened up. At the minimum, each phrase gave a good measure of its popularity (and competitiveness in case of AdWords keywords tool). It was a new experience for my friend. She was flummoxed to face a sea of keyword phrases, something she never imagined. She at last admitted the inevitability of keyword research. I held a word of caution for her, “Do not only rely on Overture and Adwords tools. It’s always good to try other tools as well�.

Keyword enriched page

My friend was mighty pleased with our brief session, but I wasn’t yet through. We came back to her readymade furnishings page. There it was, simmering with the keyword phrase alright. But it carried little meaning. To me it was like red flags waving everywhere. The emphasis was on heavy descriptions with virtually no call to action. The content didn’t spare any scope to arouse interest as if it wasn’t necessary.

I decided to come aboard. Would she buy if she came upon the webpage? She seemed hesitant, agreeing that a call to action ought to be there. But there must be much more to the content, I said. Simply placing keywords wouldn’t help. The content needed relevancy, an overall focus, easy narration and above all a gentle push to convert to sale.

A good web content has to seamlessly gel 2 factors. Tactical location of keyword is one. The webpage needs it to machine-speak to search engines to signal its importance with respect to keyword used. Human visitors need arty description in order to be convinced to make a buy. If one is science, the other relates to art of writing.

The bottomline

Optimizing for search engines is more than what meets the eye. Using a keyword without knowing its veracity is like stepping on gas before starting engine. Similarly, web content with little or no relevance does not help. A concerted effort takes time to bear fruit, but there is little choice, if any.

Admittedly, many customers insist on keywords and hard contents which they think are the most suitable ones. On the face of it, ranking high for non-competitive, obscure keywords is not difficult.

Doing proper keyword research needs both time and skill, and the service doesn’t come cheap. However, for variety of reasons, many customers do not agree to allot generous budget for seo work. In many cases, it becomes a tough call for skilled seo practitioners whether or not to take on an assignment, even if lucrative.

It is a different issue whether you’d prefer educating your client on pros and cons of keyword research and relevance of content. But shortchanging on their necessity by ignorance or otherwise is nothing less than a disservice for search engine optimizers.

Partha Bhattacharya is an experienced web content writer. Partha's blog on web marketing is a big help for small website owners.