When a person types a keyword they expect to find a site that’s all about the KEYWORD. There are search phrases in your industry that do not describe your product but people who type the search phrases are definitely your target market.

Example: (NOT THE BEST EXAMPLE….) Searching for “Web designer” …… could be relevant to “SEO” (hopefully they’ll need SEO soon).

So what many SEOs do is they advertise for a keyword “web designer” and take visitors to home page and pray that theses good folks decide to stick around and learn about the product or service they were not searching for initially.

This is a dead approach. They won’t stop and read something irrelevant. But doesn’t it feel bad when you know that these are the people you’re targeting and just because their mind set is not currently focused on your service, you have to let them go?

Here is a possible solution.

Instead of taking the consumer to an irrelevant to them (for now) page, structure your landing page around what they are looking for and lead them to your product or service. If they are searching for a web designer, you might want to take them to an article on how to choose the right web designer. Mention there how important SEO is and that this is the NEXT step in the process.

I read an article earlier where a restaurant coupon / gift card distributor would target those who were searching for a nearby restaurant. What they did is, they would instead shove these coupons in the people’s face and hope that would work. It didn’t.

They fixed it by doing exactly what I am talking about.

They simply would take a visitor to a page they created that listed all the restaurants in their area (exactly what the searcher was looking for) and towards the end of the reservation process they’d stress the coupons, gift cards and discounts.

All this is great, but don’t forget to also calculate the worthiness of this tactic for each irrelevant (at the moment) keyword. Some keywords are worth going after and some don’t.