Keyword Expectation – Simply meeting the expectation of the person performing the search request based on the meaning of the keyword or keyword phrase.

And the closer you are to meeting users “Keyword Expectation” the most likely you are to close a sale, a lead or have a subscriber to your blog or newsletter.

Why this is a simple concept, many of our new clients are often surprised to learn that they have been trying to mislead users and often disappoint visitors. The result is high web site bounce rates and higher than normal conversion costs.

Here is an example:
A Daytona Beach Hotel created web pages for Orlando hotel and Hotel near Disney, because these are popular search terms. They believed that these pages could be flipped into getting people to book hotel rooms in Daytona Beach, which is over 1 hour away from Walt Disney World!

They utilized pay per clicks to drive traffic and had the pages indexed in the major search engines. After 2 weeks they had spent hundreds of dollars on the Orlando and Disney terms and had zero conversions. They were disappointed.

They were disappointed! I hated to tell them that so were the more than 300 visitors who expected to book a hotel room in Orlando and within 5 – 10 minutes of Walt Disney World.

They had wasted their money, disappointed 300 hundred visitors and tarnished their reputation.

We advised them to focus on Daytona Beach terms, beach vacation, Florida vacation and to work on creating content that integrated the idea of staying the beach and spending a day trip to the park.

We appealed to visitors that enjoy nature, like to avoid crowds, wanted to relax and noted that family fun does not have to cost a fortune.

By evaluating the keywords they targeted, analyzing the users keyword expectation and creating pages that appeal to that audience we were able to turn visitors into vacationers!

As the internet continues to get more competitive, success is based on meeting your user’s keyword expectation and then fulfilling their want and need.

Will your company meet your user’s keyword expectation or will you continue to disappoint your web site visitors in 2008?

by Russell Troutman
Internet Marketing Manager, Sales & Marketing Technologies