I often come across money keywords, you know those terms that have good traffic and decent profit margins.  Sometimes they just don’t generate the money they should be.  It’s not because of me, it’s because the user is stupid.  You heard me right.  My mom always told me not to call people stupid, but sometimes some people are just stupid.

I think users are stupid when they search for something that they don’t want.  This is not to say they don’t wany anything, they just are searching with the wrong words.  For example I found that people searching for health insurance rarely wanted health insurance.  Personal health insurance is very expensive and generally limited on what it covers.  However if you showed them a health savings plan, your conversions will go through the roof because that is what they really wanted.

Ok maybe “stupid” is a strong word and I should have called these users “ignorant” but it is very frustrating when you develop a site with good information just to discover you need to redesign the site and create different content all because the keywords do not match the intent of the users.  Maybe a really smart search engine will start to add more weight behind toolbar data and rank sites higher based partially on CTR and length of time. (i say partially, because ctr is not too hard to fake).  After all relevance of a search engine IMHO is about giving the users want they want, not necessarily the best match of what they typed.

Until that happens how do you help yourself?  Track your conversion rates and test out new content and products.  Each month add a different banner to your homepage and see if your users go for it.  Most of the time the users will go for your site and ignore the new product/service.  But when you discover that your visitors jump for that new product/service you are testing, the increase in conversions will be worth all the effort of testing.