product or market oriented approach. which is better?

[Johara]

When choosing keywords to target for is it better to use a product oriented or market oriented approach?

By this I mean should I focus on what the site offers or what the target market would search for (in the instances that these are not necessarily the same thing)?

[Quadrille]

I don't think there's any one answer.

Know your target audience, know your product, and experiment.

I suspect focussing on your potential visitors and their expectations and desires will usually be the best way, but if you have a target audience who already knows what they want, then a product oriented approach may be quicker for them and easier for you.

Of course, a well designed site with good internal labelling and navigation will often serve both approaches successfully, allowing you to make the best of both sets of keywords.

Search engines focus on pages [urls, actually!] not sites, so catering for both is entirely possible.

[gibbs_h]

It would help you if you focus more on your products and try to describe them using most user friendly keywords which would be normally used for searching your products.

[KaloVast]

This question makes me laugh because it's a perfect example of how people think there's just a simple answer to doing this job. It reminds me of a dozen clients i've had who think they can do my job in between tasks or something. That's not to say i think YOU are this way. I think I asked the same questions a couple years ago when I started doing SEM.

I guess the news is good or bad depending on what you're into. If you like long nights filled with keyword research, then you're in luck! The sad fact of the matter is that you have to research keywords related to the product AND keywords related to the market and determine which are MOST relevant to your site, and which will have the best results for your site.

Research is fun. Research is your friend. If do your research you'll reap the rewards of quality traffic!

[Eljaybe]

Glad I found this post, as I was just having the same issue with a consumer products site I am optimizing. There are products that are searched by several different names (but same product). We are trying to weave in the keywords that are most relevant, highly searched, and closely related to the product name currently on the site. It's difficult to ask a client to change the name of their product to help with SEO, since they normally decline that idea (probably because they have so much off-line advertising that calls it "Product A").
Anyway, thanks for the post! It was reassuring!

[Eljaybe]

I do have a question on usage of these alternative keywords in the meta keywords tag (even though search engines do not use them much anymore)...
If the alternative names of a product featured on the page are not actually on the page, would the keywords meta tag be the place to add these alternative meanings of the word?
For instance, my product is called "widget trimmer" and that is how it's shown on the page. But many people call it a "widget cutter" or "widget chopper". Do I add these to the meta keywords tag even though they are not in the body copy?

[KaloVast]

The Meta Keyword tag is barely ever used anymore. I use that section as a means to actually list the keywords or phrases i am targeting for that specific page. Beyond that it does virtually nothing.