Why You Should Ensure Your Keywords are still Fresh
Sometimes the focus of a page will shift. Not always, and certainly not by a great deal, but changes do occur you need to be able to review your keywords to ensure they are still representative.
It sounds a simple thing, but you’d be surprised how many sites cling on to their outdated key terms and phrases in the hopes of attracting traffic. The trouble is, as we all know, if a keyword isn’t representative of a website, the traffic it receives won’t be as targeted. So getting visitors through the door is always good, but if they aren’t converting you could be wasting a page.
So whenever you have a change of direction for a page, re-evaluate the keywords that you use to maintain decent levels of relevance. Although of course you don’t have to wait. If you feel that some keywords aren’t performing as well as they could be don’t be afraid to make changes.
You can research keywords as an ongoing project. Traffic levels will naturally fluctuate, but sometimes phrases will trend higher than others as they slip into the public lexicon. You don’t want to be left behind in any case, so making sure you’re fully optimised at all times won’t do any harm.
Of course changing keywords isn’t quite as simple as just altering your H1 heading on any given page. You will have to look at all aspects, including internal link tags, Meta and content. These will then have to be optimised to target the new phrases.
That can be a lot of work and it could mean that you sacrifice rankings for a while as the search engines re-index the page and adjust your rankings accordingly. But once you do get your site back up to full strength and with new terms targeted, you should find that you get traffic that is more relevant and possibly converts better.
There are risks involved, which is why you shouldn’t make any wholesale changes without a pretty decent reason for doing so. Make sure you’ve done the required research and don’t change a page that is converting well purely on a hunch. Unless you have a fair amount of evidence to support your assumption (i.e. there are growing traffic levels but only a few competitors), then it is sometimes best to leave it well alone.
There’s no harm in doing research though, so use the tools you have at your disposal to constantly monitor keywords and their effectiveness. You could even try split testing to see how your audience would react to a change of on-site content. Just avoid anything that might prove costly both in terms of time wasted and the eventual outcome.
