This post is going to look at a very simple way to spend less time on your SEO but make more money from it.
Here goes…
So imagine this…
You’ve got a list of keywords ready that you think are going to be profitable and you’re ready to start developing some content.
Which do you do next?
If you’re a PPC marketer, you put up ads on as many different keywords as you can and see which ones stick. You ditch the least profitable keywords and you leave the most profitable keyword groups running and try to optimize your ads to improve CTR.
If you’re marketing with search traffic however, the game is a little different.
Assume you have two keywords with similar search volume, and you’ve got page one rankings for both of them. The traffic from each of those keywords is going to make you a different amount of money. The traffic from each keyword is going to convert at a different rate.
That means, if you did the same amount of work to get each of those sites to page 1, one of those terms is paying a better return on your time and money than the other.
It’s all very well to go out and wildly try to get rankings for as many terms as you can, but in the end, you’ll find that 80/20 applies.
80 percent of your income will come from 20% of your keywords.
Now if you spend the same amount of effort and money on each keyword, the above is bad news.
But if you focus most of your effort on that 20% of keywords, guess what happens. You spend less time on your SEO overall and you make the same amount, if not MORE income from your effort.
So the big question is “How do you identify those 20% keywords?”
The first and most obvious answer is, you test.
Even if you don’t do PPC you NEED to test your site’s pages and their conversion with paid traffic first.
By running paid traffic to a page, from all your different keywords, you can see within days which are your most profitable keywords.
Yes it might cost you a hundred bucks or two but think how much effort this saves you down the track. You can now spend all your time focusing on keywords that you KNOW are going to yield a high return on effort/investment – that’s called running a REAL business 
Second, if you really have some fundamental problem with running a paid ad campaign, you can simply do some THINKING.
The keywords that will convert best are, surprisingly, the terms that are most RELEVANT to the offer you’re promoting.
There are always keywords that will surprise you but as a general rule, if you’re promoting a colon cleanse product…
The keyword “colon cleanse”
won’t convert as well as “colon cleansing product”
which won’t convert as well as “buy colon cleansing product”
And so on.
So you can try to think it out, and rank your keywords in terms of their likelihood of a high conversion, from most likely to be high converting, to least likely. It’s not perfect but it will help.
And what do you do when you have an idea (or a fact) of what keywords will convert the best?
First you pat yourself on the back for being in the 5% of intelligent search marketers.
Then you go about optimizing your site and building links in order to promote the content you develop on THOSE KEYWORDS FIRST.
If you’ve identified 5 most profitable words, work on them first.
Even if they aren’t the least competitive terms and it’s harder for you to get great rankings, remember these are the terms that you don’t need as much traffic from in order to make sales.
10 visitors from these keywords might be equivalent to 100 visitors from a lower converting keyword – so even if you get less visitors numerically by attacking these terms, the amount of revenue they generate will be higher than the more easily attainable but lower converting keywords further down your list.
Is this all making sense?
By approaching your search engine marketing this way you can save yourself alot of time and money, not to mention frustration.
This is how smart search marketers do it.
