Friday, December 23, 2011

SEO Lesson #2: More Guayaki Yerba Mate

Yesterday we posted on a friend's company who is examining their search engine visibility. The company is called Guayaki and they sell products based on the culture of a plant named Ilex paraguariensis, commonly referred to as Yerba Mate. All the founders of Guayaki have a passion for mate but they also want to be socially responsible. They have pioneered an innovative business model that directly links their customer’s purchases to partner farming communities in their supply chain, enabling fair trade, fair wages and the ability to restore parts of the rain forests from which the Yerba plan grows.

Yesterday we explored how Google's results vastly vary based on where a search is being done from.  This is largely a baseline for understanding where the results are.  Today we will examine what course of action could be taken to elevate their relevancy for various searches.  As always, Technoracle never recommends cheating on SEO.  The rules and systems used by various search engines are very fair and have feedback mechanisms to promote relevant results.  There is no point in coming up #1 for a topic like "horses" if your website is all about golfing.  This serves no purpose and will annoy anyone unlucky enough to find your site.

Having said that, the first thing to do is to try and determine the actual search inventory that is available and what related searches might be useful.  We ran some reports on various systems and determined the following:

The term "yerba mate" has relatively low competition and there are 246,000 global searches and 8,100 local searches per month. The term "yerba" by itself has over 823,000 global searches per month while the term "mate" has 13,000,000 plus. The latter must be heavily discounted since it is a term with a plurality of meanings. People may be trying to find a mate instead of yerba.

The company itself has done well and every month, over 9,900 searches are done for Guayaki. This indicates a good brand presence yet shows us that there is a lot of upside potential.  Stated simply, being able to capitalize on close to a million new eyeballs per month on their website would be potentially lucrative.

There are also mis-spelled variants of "yerba mate" such as "yerbe mata" which are commonly used plus a third word "la" (spanish) used as an article in conjunction with the term. It is possible that capturing this traffic is something that could be of interest.

At this point we are ready to generate a report to present to Guayaki. The company is strong, has a great community and is ready to grow.  There are various techniques that can be used to build search engine traffic but the most proven way is to ensure what you are serving your website visitors is what they are looking for.  Our next step is to use some analytics to understand what the people searching for are hoping to find when they land on the website.  Google Analytics is probably the best tool in the business for this.

On a final note - Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it!  This will be our last post until after the holidays.  Peace and blessings and thank you for supporting our blog.

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