Where Can I Donate a Car in Dallas?

Great content matching popular keywords is the key to online traffic. A basic for first graders in web marketing. Yet it’s also an area of least focus for many (not to say most) small and midsize businesses (and even larger ones). Not that they don’t spend a lot on keyword advertising and so-called search engine “optimization”. But let’s be honest, only few businesses are going beyond hiring an SEO agency and reviewing the initial list of 20 to 30 keywords that the agency is submitting once a year, when it comes to renewing its contract.

Developing relevant content for your website, going through lists of hundreds of possible keywords, and then back to ‘optimizing’ your content to better match the keywords is such a painful and unrewarding process, that you don’t want to go through it more than necessary. Unfortunately, ‘necessary’ can be ‘very often’ when it comes to keep a website attractive. The best SEO agency can’t do a good job without some insight into your market, your business, your products. More importantly, as good as it can be in leveraging your current ‘assets’ (the content of your website), it most likely won’t add to it and keep it current. Scheduling monthly meetings with your agency to review traffic results and conversion rates is great, but not enough. Monitoring the search volume for your keywords, taking one out and putting one in is good, but not enough. You know it: great content matching popular keywords is the key to success. And like it or not, it all starts with relevant content, that only your company can provide.

The November issue of Wired Magazine features an interesting article about Demand Media and the success of this company in overwhelming the Web with millions of cheap articles and videos matching popular searches to maximize advertising revenue. The story opens multiple debates – including ethical – about the quality and reliability of information that this kind of “content factory” is dumping on the Internet. But from a business perspective, it is a stunning reminder of some basic keyword advertising principles: web search is about demand, not offer. Yet very few BtoB sites are ‘optimized’ this way.

I named this post after the most valuable search topic uncovered by Demand Media so far (apparently, a lot of people are searching for car donation in Dallas, and advertisers are willing to pay a lot for it). However, I doubt that it will make me either rich, nor popular. The title does not really match the content of this article, and more importantly, it might not be great enough (let’s face it!). But how better could I make my point? The best keyword strategy can’t do more for your website without more, better and current content!