JERUSALEM — Here in the Silicon Valley of the Middle East, I once attended a networking event at which representatives of Israeli SEO companies gave brief presentations to local businessmen on various online-marketing topics. The speaker on keyword research made an excellent point that is worth remembering for people interested in how to do SEM for electronics companies:
The more specific the search, the more likely that a person is looking to buy.
Here is what the speaker meant. A person looking for general information on “digital cameras” will likely search Google for just that short-tail keyword. But a person who looks specifically for “Nikon D3X” is likely looking to purchase that product — and using search engines to find the best price as well. The take-away: Short-tail keywords should be targeted to provide information; long-tail keywords should be targeted to make sales. It is the primary reason that an SEO-optimized website structure should go from short-tail or long-tail keywords as one proceeds further inside a site (often using a process called “breadcrumb navigation”):
Nikon USA –> Nikon Products –> Digital SLR Cameras –> Nikon D3X
Now, just so my readers know: Nikon is not an SEO-consulting services client, so I have not analyzed their search-engine optimization specifically. I cite them only since the aforementioned speaker mentioned “digital cameras” as an example in his keyword-research talk. However, the company is a useful example of what can form the basis of an effective SEM-electronics strategy in this specific industry using both short-tail and long-tail keywords.
In so-called “inbound marketing,” the goal of most websites needs to be twofold: to become a industry thought-leader (through blog posts, white papers, and articles) and to generate revenue (through advertising clicks, product sales, or other means). General pages with short-tail keywords can be used to provide information; the specific pages further inside the website hierarchy can be used to generate sales. If a website visitor is impressed by the informational pages, then he will be more likely to make a purchase since he will be more likely to view the company subconsciously as a reputable thought-leader within the specific industry. It’s one way that branding can be used in an online, SEO-based context.
SEM Electronics
However, this strategy is much easier to use specifically in an SEM-electronics company — or any other sector — that offers many products. Companies that offer services generally have fewer keywords that they can target. Say that your business aims to teach English as a second language. Most of the researched keywords will resemble “learn English,” or something to that effect. There will be little variety. However, companies that sell products can target dozens, if not hundreds, of keywords because each individual product will be searched within Google in its own right (see the “Nikon D3X” example above).
The electronics industry is the best example since each brand will have dozens of products, and each product will have dozens of models. Any company that can rank highly in search engines for each specific product model will certainly receive a high level of organic-search traffic — that those visitors are those who are most likely to convert into sales.
The take-away: It will take a lot longer to optimize each page of an SEM-electronics website, but the results will make it worthwhile. The key is to do the optimization correctly so that it will need to be revisited only rarely. We invite readers to peruse our SEO-software reviews to see which platforms may work best for them.
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