• Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?
• Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part IX
• An End To Ranking Reports Is An End to Analysis
• Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part X

My labrador ranks #1 (and 2) for "Blogging Labrador" and she is very happy about it. Just wait until other labs start blogging, she's gonna be on top! Early adopter and all that. :)

Seriously, getting excited about words or phrases nobody is searching for is plain silly.

Posted by: Michael D on July 9, 2008

"Mental Health Development" may not get any searches but it doesn't mean that many people can't benefit from it. Once Dr. Phil takes over the world, expect that to change :.)

Posted by: Todd Mintz on July 9, 2008

Oh, and it's not just ranking, you can say the same thing for traffic too. So you get a ton of traffic for "Free Linday Lohan Pictures". but if you're an industrial ball bearing manufacturer what good does that do you? What's your conversion rate? ROI?

Posted by: Simon Heseltine on July 9, 2008

Good point Simon. Very true.

But, uh, who in their right mind is looking for Lindsay Lohan Pics? I saw those Marilyn Monroe poses she did and my eyes screamed out in pain. :)

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on July 9, 2008

Give me ROI over #1 rankings any day! But maybe in your example above it's both? What if the rate of return on those phrases is exponentially ginormous compared to others? Or maybe the offline time investment to convert to customers is minimal and the others, financially speaking, are just not worth targeting? I love keyword tools too, but sometimes they don't tell the whole story.

Great title by the way! :)

Posted by: Chris on July 9, 2008

Good point Chris, a very valid argument. We've seen a number of times that Wordtracker and the other tools just can't get good numbers on certain keywords. They don't do well with low-volume. If the rankings produce quality traffic then someone is definitely there to hear it and it certainly does make a difference.

This is why focusing on rankings just isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are so many other factors that matter. These are the factors that should be discussed, unless of course you get some real bragging rights. that's always fun.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on July 9, 2008

Ok, so you're top for some keyword phrases that aren't often searched on. You don't want to lose these, but you do want to start targeting better keywords. What to do?

My uneducated guess would be to look at the pages that get these top positions, work out what about them is getting you those top positions then move them to another page and free up your key pages to work on the better keywords.

Thoughts anyone?

Posted by: Halestorm on July 10, 2008

@ Halestorm

If you don't change the content too drastically you can simply alter the text for the new keywords. See if that effects the performance of your other keywords. If it does then perhaps develop new content for the keywords that were previously ranked and link to that content from the pages that held the rankings prior.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on July 10, 2008

Ok, here's a relevant example of something I'm seeing at the moment on a site we're testing for SEO.

We had an A-Z listing of hotels in London. Each hotel had it's address along side it. We loaded all hotels into the page and displayed only a letter at a time using JavaScript so it wasn't too unwealdy for the user. This meant that we had a bunch of hotels and addresses on one page.

What we found was that people were searching for hotel address information and that different parts of their query would match different hotel addresses and hence return our A-Z page.

So for "hotels in tw8 9es", the "TW8" would match one hotel address and the "9ES" would match another.

What we have just now done is to make separate pages for each letter and removed the address information from the listing page and move it to the hotel's page.

We're now waiting to see how the search engines respond to this and are wondering if we've given up those search placing.

The site is www.ldnhotels.com and we're using this as a test to see if we can make any inroads into this competitive market. Oh and I should warn you, the site is very much in it's early stages ;)

Posted by: Halestorm on July 10, 2008

Hi--I love all the columns here at Search Engine Guide, and this one has me wondering about a topic that recently came up for me in real life: the accuracy of Google's Keyword Tool vs. Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. I use the latter two (I'm a copywriter), but an SEO I recently worked with said she uses Google's free tool. The thing is, there's a huge disparity in the numbers. Now, I know it's not all about the numbers, and I can understand numbers differing a bit tool-to-tool. But, for example, I decided to plug in "personal skills development" in WT and Google's tool. You're correct in that this phrase gets zero searches per day in WT. But in Google's tool, it estimates 320 searches a month (if I'm understanding/reading it correctly, and who knows...I might not be). There's an interesting debate happening here about Google's tool (I'm not affiliated with this blog...but Jill Whalen from High Rankings pointed me to it): http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2008/07/15/why-the-google-keyword-tool-is-useless-for-seo-even-with-exact-numbers/

I did a quick search on "Google's Keyword Tool" on Search Engine Guide to see if the tool's relevance has been discussed in any columns, but I don't *think* it has been...I'd love to hear what you think about the tool and why there's such disparity. Is it possible that the company bragging about its SEO successes used that tool??

Thanks again for the great columns!

Posted by: Robyn on July 19, 2008

@ Robyn,

I recently read that article too. During some research for a client I compared Google's keyword tool numbers with Wordtracker. On average Google's numbers were about 5000% higher than Wordtrackers. In some cases that fit with traffic patterns but not even close in others. So I'd say it's real hard to say. I think Wordtracker understates a lot of numbers, especially those on the low end, but Google's I think are way high.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on July 21, 2008