I want to share a guest post from Jeff Sliger to talk about the relationship between Search Optimization and the kind of Website Optimization we discuss in the book.
I come at SEO from the point that I was trying to get my own business website to come up when a potential customer was searching.  My website SpaCap.com is where our customers have found out about our custom made Hot Tub Covers since the Internet went public.

For the past ten years the most important, most commonly searched for phrase that was used to find our product has been “spa covers.”  Every time I did keyword research related to consumers looking for a replacement Hot Tub Cover, spa covers, with the S at the end was used almost twice as often as any other keyword phrase.

However, since Search Optimization is a process that is never really finished, I still do check search volumes for related terms.
Recently while doing some other research I ran my own key words through my research tools and found that a shift in search had taken place.  Here’s what I found:

The Diagnosis

Both of those were pretty much what I expected. What I did not expect is what follows,

By not paying attention to search statistics I was missing out on keywords that were getting almost double the traffic I was getting now.

The Cure

In consideration of these results, my job now is to cull through my website and analyze each page and its performance.  I am looking for the pages that don’t get a lot of attention now.  From those I will pick the top ten that really could stand to be reworked.

Each of these pages will be rewritten to focus on the new target keyword phrase, “Hot Tub Covers”.  Once I have gone over the meta tags to make sure they aren’t causing a problem for the Search Spiders and made sure that the fresh content is not just relevant to my target words but flows well for my actual human visitors I will post them on the site. I will also take a look at my site linking structure to make sure that my own links to these pages uses my target phrase as anchor text.

I will make a note when the Spider has last visited my site and how my changes affect my search ranking.  Meanwhile I’ll get busy building links on other websites that use my new keyword phrase as the anchor text.

In about a month I should be ranking well for my new phrases as well as my original keywords.  So if done right I won’t loose any of my current volume from searches and I should get a significant boost in exposure and traffic just from being seen for more commonly searched relevant keywords.

<From Carlos>

Keyword research is one of the first steps in communication with your visitors. What are they looking for? By collecting this data and rewriting your content to fulfill their needs helps you get more traffic from the phrase and to pull the visitor through your content. Because Jeff has seen a significant change in the way people search for his product he should consider creating a custom segment to track the behavior of people using the phrase hot tub covers. He should compare their basic data against the data from spa covers to see who he is really serving.

Because Jeff is running an e-commerce site and maintains a pay per clisk campaign the most valuable in sight that may come from the tracking is better understanding of the regionality of searches. Spa vs. hot tub could me a result of dialect differences– in that case changing the geo-location of PPC campaigns and image content on spa and hot tub focused pages may be in order.