SEO for a niche product in a niche market!

[Morrack]

Hi all,

I'm having trouble getting good SERPS, mainly on google but I would like to be doing better on the other engines also. I paid for a wordtracker account and have just spent several frustrating hours hoping I could find better keywords to optimise for.

The issue is: 1 - I'm selling a homeschooling curriculum, which is a niche industry to start with. 2 - It's specifically a french as a second language curriculum, which is a quite small niche within the homeschooling industry. 3 - In spite of the above, there is PLENTY of competition for the handfull of terms that generate any significant amount of traffic - and they aren't very targeted terms either, anything well targetted gets only a handfull of searches per day.

In my situation, should I abandon my efforts to find a keyword phrase with a suitable KEI and try to tackle the main phrases? Has anyone tried to do SEO for a website in a similiar situation? What approach did you find worked? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

On the upside, I'm able to run a fairly extensive adwords campaign without breaking the bank



Peter Sherwood

Morrack Consulting

http://www.morrack.com

 

[Morrack]

duh - I guess I should post the URL for the site I'm trying to optimize. It's not the one in my signature line, but rather this one:

http://www.theeasyfrench.com

Thanks all


Peter Sherwood

Morrack Consulting

http://www.morrack.com

 

[Foamcow]

If the product is so niche then it is only to be expected that highly targetted terms only turn up a handful of searches each day.

The point is that they are targetted. The people using them are potentially quite likely to buy your product/service.

It's better to have 1 visitor and a sale than 100 visitors who aren't really interested.

What terms are you using?
The "home" page, whilst being adequate could probably do with some work. Without doing any research I can guess at the most common keywords and they don't really feature that highly on your homepage.

Tell me, does the "Statement of Faith" feature highly in your product? Do your customers value it?

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Toccoa Games - Day of Defeat gaming community
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
"I'm making time

 

[trollacious]

I would be leery of buying French language material from a company that spells French with a lower case "f" as much as is on your main page. Spelling errors on sites that sell educational material are counterproductive.

While I can understand your Statement of Faith targeting home schoolers, I'd put that link just before Email.

Lee

 

[Morrack]

Thanks for your comments foamcow. I was actually just sitting here considering how to rework the main page to improve my conversion rate - and take the opportunity to improve on my SEO efforts.

My target market is (of course) homeschoolers, most of whom are christians - so the statement of faith does apply, especially since this program features christian content.

From my research, people search on several derivations of homeschooling:

homeschooling
home schooling
homeschool
home school

So I have to optimize for 4 different primary keywords before I even get into phrases. Secondary keywords I'm using are: easy, french, christian, phonetic, curriculum, program.

I'm going to try to work these terms into the main page more, looking it over I see you're right that I'm not using them enough.

Any further thoughts?



Peter Sherwood

Morrack Consulting

http://www.morrack.com

 

[Morrack]

I would be leery of buying French language material from a company that spells French with a lower case "f" as much as is on your main page. Spelling errors on sites that sell educational material are counterproductive."

ACK!!! Thanks for pointing that out, I'll fix that immediately




Peter Sherwood

Morrack Consulting

http://www.morrack.com

 

[trollacious]

Make use of the image alt tags to add your terms to your site, as well as make it more accessible to vision-impaired people. Like for you big animated picture (and you shouldn't put spaces in graphic or page names, or capital letters) could have an alt tag like "The Easy French phonetic homeschooling curriculum logo", or some other short phrase that would enhance the key words, and make the page more visible to everyone. You have alt tags on the buttons, but you can expand what those say, as well, to be more descriptive of the pages they point to.

Put some commas between the words/phrases in the keyword section, too.

You might want to run the site through validator.w3.org to pick up the errors on the page. You're going to get a lot of errors from validation because of the IE only tags you use: leftmargin, topmargin, etc.

Lee

 

[trollacious]

I see you got the capitalization fixed. C'est meilleur. #

Lee

 

[Foamcow]

Make use of the image alt tags to add your terms to your site

Likewise add title attributes to your links.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Toccoa Games - Day of Defeat gaming community
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
"I'm making time

 

[Morrack]

Ok, I've made massive changes to the main page. Anyone care to give me their thoughts now?

Your assistance with this is GREATLY appreciate folks. Let me know if ever need telecom help



Peter Sherwood

Morrack Consulting

http://www.morrack.com

 

[trollacious]

I'd say that the next step if HTML validation. If the tags are wrong, the spiders might not read the page correctly. Here's a link to your main page checked for validation through W3C.org.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.theeasyfrench.com/

Lee

 

[ChrisHirst]

There are lots of elements to change on your site before it even begins to be optimised.

Wordtracker is not the best keyword resource tool, your site logs are and running an adwords campaign will tell you what people use on google.
KEI is the most useless metric from WT, ignore it!
The problem with WT is the data only comes from the meta engines (dogpile, metcrawler etc) they do not have data from the SEs where people really search so the info is limited. Do not take it as an absolute.
For now forget the apparently high count words they will happen naturally as part of the phrase optimisation. Targetted phrases will bring buyers instead of "tyre kickers"
Target two or three phrases per page use the title and page headings appropriately.
I'll digress slightly here. LOSE THE GIF it's far too big, at 800x600 it takes up 2/3 of the page and pushes the copy way down "below the fold", And the movement is distracting. You want people to read the copy not stare at that.

More resources HR and IHY




Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Morrack]

I was kind of torn up about that GIF. My wife (the program author) likes it but I had the same concern you expressed. Does anyone else have an opinion?

Thanks for the info on WT! Now I wish I had paid for a day or week instead of 3 months

Although what you say about WT data coming from meta engines makes perfect sense, I'm surprised to hear you dismiss KEI. It had also made a great deal of sense to me. How do you suggest selecting phrases to try and optimize for then? The most traffic would come from "french curriculum" according to my adwords account, but if I'm not linked enough to get a top position for that phrase what good is optimizing for it?

Fascinating - I just check with WT and the search phrase "french curriculum" doesn't even appear. Yet, that's my number 1 keyword phrase in adwords, having triggered my ad 10,119 in the last 3 months.... *grin* I'm liking this approach!



Peter Sherwood

Morrack Consulting

http://www.morrack.com

 

[johnwm]

I would lose the .GIF on the home page. It's too big, and the flashing distracts from the important bits. This sort of stuff on the home page makes it look a bit amateurish, as if it were written in FP

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[ChrisHirst]

The problem with KEI is it does rely on a quoted match so doesn't really reflect how "real" users search, so although the calculation makes sense the numbers don't always.
And as you are finding out many phrases that do bring traffic don't even make the WT list.

Take a look at Overture's Suggestion Tool though again, take the numbers with a pinch of salt as they are skewed by auto keyword checking tool. Even Google Suggest can be a useful source of alternatives.

"french curriculum" doesn't appear to be competitive at all. quoted search, intitle: and allintitle and it looks like most of the sites on the first couple of pages are "accidentaly optimised"

You will find this more and more as you work on the site. What you thought (or maybe assumed) to be competing sites aren't really, and do not overlook the importance of your own links in the grand scheme of things and waste them with using "home" ,"about us" etc. Use alt attributes as anchor text for image links.
Use the elements you are in control of to good effect.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.