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Have you ever bought a book from a store based on the cover art only to find the content is completely unrelated to the picture?

Have you ever watched a movie based on a trailer only to find the 30 second trailer was a carefully crafted highlight and the rest of the movie was rubbish?

Have friends recommended restaurants only to find that the food and service were atrocious?

It really sucks to have your high expectations dashed on the rocks of disappointment and be left on a ship-wreck of disillusionment.  The same strangled metaphor goes for websites.

Consider a user arriving on your site from a Google/Yahoo/Bing search.  Say you rank highly for certain keywords related to your products or services:

• What if your landing page doesn’t deliver the promise of the finely crafted and optimised search result?

• What if your product range is broad and your homepage can’t cram all your awesome widget pictures on the page?

The user is going to be disappointed.  They’ll leave your site.  Sure, they might buy something else (one day) but you know that feeling of not finding just what you were looking for.

What if this didn’t happen and you could meet the user’s needs and exepctations every time they searched for your site, products or services?  You can. You just need to make your homepage (or any landing page) keyword aware.

What is it?

A keyword aware homepage (lets say all your landing pages are effectively homepages for now) will know when a user arrives on your site from an organic search; it will know what the user searched for and if it has some specific content related to the search, it’ll show it.

How does it work?

Your site can easily see when someone landed on the site from a search engine and what the user searched for – use the Google Analytics utmz cookie for an easy way to extract this information.  You could roll your own if you’re not using Google Analytics (GA) but as GA has done all the hard work in knowing what all the search engines are and how they send the search phrase used by the user, you may as well get GA do all the hard work for you!

So, you’ve captured the moment when the user lands on the site from a search and you know what the search phrase was.  What do you do next?

Choose keywords

Use a decent body of data from GA or Web Analytics tool of choice (up to 6 months should do the job nicely) to find the top 50 most common search queries used by users to find your site through organic search.  You could also use your top converting paid traffic search phrases too.

Use this data to understand user intent.  They are telling you what they want to find on your site through a neat little user intent survey tool called a search engine!  This is golden data – use volume and conversion rates (per search phrase) to find the hot topics that yield economic value on the site.

Okay, you know what users want when they search for your site, now there is one more step tp join up the dots.

Choose your content (carefully)

Here’s a suggested approach:

Use the most popular landing page (from organic search) for your first investment in this technique.  We’ll assume it’s your homepage and that you display a ‘hero image’ on the homepage.  Use javascript to determine when a user lands on the homepage from an organic search, find the search phrase and see if it’s in your magic list.  It is?  Great!  Now we need a hero image that matches the search phrase.  Is the user searching for the ‘turbo mega eagle thrust 2 pen’?  Right, you’ve got a high quality image of the product?  Super, show that image.

Rinse and repeat for more search phrases and images.

Caveat:
Choose the content you change based on keyword matches carefully.  Ensure the change in content does not get you slammed by search engines for sneakily changing content on the fly…you have been warned!

What if you can’t match the keyword to an image?  Show a default.  Simple.  Finished?  Nope – the next steps are equally important.

Measure the results

You’ve made a pretty neat change to the behaviour of your homepage.  You’ve made an investment.  As a serious data driven marketer you want to demonstrate to your HiPPOs that there is a significant return from this investment.  So you have to measure the effects of the keyword sensitivity.

We chose to record a session level custom variable in Google Analytics when keywords were matched and non-standard images were shown.  We recorded both the keyword and the image shown.  The power of custom variables is in using them to create advanced segments to see what behaviour the segment of ‘keyword matched’ users exhibited as opposed to those who were not ‘keyword matched’.  Over time you should see how users respond.

I’ll show you my findings later.

Give the keyword sensitive homepage a decent crack of the whip.  Let it run for a month and then take a look at the data trends.  How do users bounce?  Do they spend longer on the site?  Do they convert more?  Do they buy the products you’re showing on the homepage that match their search query?  Find the differences.  Build on the positives – make it work harder.

Optimise and scale

So, have you found the search queries that when matched reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rate?

Cool!  You’ve tackled your ‘head’ terms.  Ever heard of the ‘long tail’?  You need to tackle those guys next.  How long is your long tail?  Pretty long I’d guess.  So, you’re going to find a lot of terms that (individually) offer marginal gains.  Aggregate those marginal gains across a thousand keywords and if each term matched offers 0.1% improvement in bounce rate then…well you do the math(s).  It’s worth it.

Be advised, not all search terms will work well first time out.  You might have to change the image.  You might have to remove it from your list and just let the default hero image show – if it works better.  The advice here is to never stop optimising and testing new images and keywords.

Whilst optimising for keywords and images, maintain the performance of the match and display functionality.  Don’t let 10000 keywords in your list slow the display of the hero image down to a crawl.  As you scale up the functionality, make sure the speed scales also.

An example

All this is fine in theory.  How about some empirical evidence to support the hypothesis?

We ran a month long test on two sites: RadissonEdwardian.co.uk and TheMayFairHotel.co.uk:

RadissonEdwardian.co.uk with no matched keywords:

RadissonEdwardian.co.uk with ‘Heathrow’ matched keyword:

TheMayFairHotel.co.uk with no matched keywords:

TheMayFairHotel.co.uk with ‘spa’ match keyword:

Both sites were subject to the process described above and the results were extremely positive:

RadissonEdwardian.co.uk:

For users who had a search keyword matched:

• Pages/visit increased by 80%
• Time on site increased by 150%
• Bounce rate reduced by 66%

One keyword in particular stood out as ‘a real doozy’ (a very good thing):

• 98% increase in pages/visit
• 160% increase in time on site
• 76% reduction in bounce rate

TheMayFairHotel.co.uk:

For users who had a search keyword matched:

• Pages/visit increased by 20%
• Time on site increased by 30%
• Bounce rate reduced by 18%

Again an outstanding performer keyword is worth highlighting:

• 43% increase in pages/visit
• 58% increase in time on site
• 51% reduction in bounce rate

Conclusions

The results above show the potential of the technique.  These were results for head terms.  Realistic expectations for long tail terms would be less in terms of metric deltas but aggregated across a larger scale implementation the returns become more significant.

No SEO impact has been recorded during these studies due to careful choice of content and thorough testing of the implementation.

As we saw above, your results may vary.  The imagery shown on TheMayFairHotel.co.uk was already spectacular (as you would expect for a high end luxury London hotel) hence the degree of uplift was less but still strongly positive.

We’re now in the process of scaling this behaviour and await further significant results.  Watch this space.

In the meantime – can you find more keywords that yield the described behaviour on the sites above? ;-)