The Internet is a labyrinth of sites so big it boggles the mind. In fact, how someone manages to find your site is a miracle of modern technology right?
But all traffic is not created equal
Most of the time, we don’t pay enough attention to how people find our sites, we just assume it is someone typing something in the Google address bar and POOF, they wind up on our sites, and for the most part that’s true. Except, the searcher’s intent is even more important now than ever before.
Why, because we all know all search traffic is not created equal. Let’s take a look at where two search terms and how one could mean anything, and the other could mean cold, hard cash to your contracting company.
Consider someone searching on Google for “paint”
That is as plain vanilla a search term as it gets. And we have no way to determine the searcher’s intent. We don’t know if they are looking for kid’s paints, interior pant, exterior pant, or a painter. These types of searches are a pain in the ass for the search engines to return a solid result for.
But consider for a second the person that types “interior painting contractor in Philadelphia PA” into the search bar. That person is a buyer with cash in hand ready to make a purchase. They are not looking for DIY info, they are not looking for tips or tricks on painting, they are looking to hire YOU!
The takeaway here is, start digging under the hood and monitor your website stats to find out what terms people are using to find you online. For example, let’s look at some keyword searches people used to find my site last month:
- Darren Slaughter
- Thumbtack reviews (by the way, if you are not on Thumbtack.com, check it out!)
- Good construction advertisements
- Darren Slaughter marketing
- Newsletters for contractors (hint hint Tess)
So, let’s break it down a bit to determine user intent
Two out of the five searches incorporate my name, so people already KNOW what they are looking for; me! Nice feeling too by the way!
The “Thumbtack.com reviews” is natural or organic traffic I get for the review I did about Thumbtack.com.
“Good construction advertisements” is definitely a keyword I want to get found for, and “newsletters for contractors” is another great one.
All of these searches are perfect for what I do here at Darren’s, and since the people who search for these (and many others) stay around the site for a long time (avg of 9:46) and look at a lot of pages (avg. of 14), Google KNOWS that this site delivers the goods for those people seeking either contractor marketing or construction marketing advice.
Now you need to find out what your site delivers. So get your webmaster to install Google Analytics on your site and start educating yourself on who visits your online showroom everyday.
