It’s an interesting process SEO. Sometimes even keyword research can be enlightening; it’s been fascinating to watch key phrases change over the years as searchers have become more in tune with searching and search engines. Instead of typing ‘full blown’ questions into search engines (like the www.askjeeves.com model – now www.ask.com people now type in phrases which hardly make sense! And when this happens, it’s very difficult to insert those weird phrases into your ‘sales’ copy.

Recently, we came up against one such situation where we discovered a popular key phrase but found it incredibly difficult to get it "on-page". The phrase was: ‘pre pay credit card’. We discovered it after the customer gave us some reports from their AdWords campaign. They supplied us with visitor and conversion data. Over the period of one month there were 304 visitors for ‘pre pay credit card’, and 42 conversions (or applications). That makes the conversion rate of the key phrase ‘pre pay credit card’ an astonishing 13.8%!

I’LL TAKE IT!

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one of the client’s web pages ranking top 3 for that lovely key phrase!

The next challenge was how to get it on the page and integrated into a sentence. We thought we’d done it by simply wrapping the phrase in quotation marks… Like this:

"Get your (Customer name) ‘pre pay credit card’ by applying online now."

The customer wanted it, but they were unable to due to the phrase not meeting certain conditions (‘acceptable marketing language’) as set out in the reference guide supplied by the major (global) credit card vendor. Obviously it would be more appropriate to use ‘prepaid credit card’ (which makes tons more sense), but we’d already optimised the home page for that phrase! Dammit.

To get around the problem we decided to get a bit more lateral. We sat down with the client to discuss some work-arounds including:

• A FAQ section to each page, with questions like "Is this a pre pay credit card" and then an answer "No, this is not a pre pay credit card, it is a prepaid credit card..." etc – Turns out, this was ok!


• We were also allowed to put variations in the Title tag and Meta-tags, just not on the page.

We’ll be implementing the idea in the next few weeks… Let’s hope we hit the top! I’ll keep you posted…

Chris Thomas, Search Engine Optimisation Specialist

Labels: Search Engine Optimisation