Why no traffic despite 2nd position?

what explains this ...

[przero2]

hi, the site in my profile comes up second for - discount web hosting - or many combinations of these 3 words ... yet I have not received one visitor. Overtures shows over 5000 searches per month for those key words. I am having difficulty explaining this to a client as I expected at least 100 visitors from a 2nd position for a such a competitive key word!. what explains this ...??

[JamesR]

How long has the site been in that position? Are your logs picking up your own clicks on that link?

[przero2]

the site has been there for few months and logs picked our own clicks ... but no one else except one or two??

[jady]

What I always explain to our clients it; "We can get you a higher ranking, but we cant guarantee you business!"

[przero2]

jady, that makes a lot of sense and we did not guarantee business or clicks in this case either. however, it is puzzling me that the traffic from google and all its vast network is so little for these competitive keywords. i guess i am trying to understand what is causing this as opposed to much on what to say the client!.

[buckworks]

What WordTracker says regarding the number of searches:

discount web hosting 77
discount cheap web hosting 5  
discount web hosting catalog.com 4  
discount web hosting domain 4  
web hero discount domains and hosting 3 

Compare that to

web hosting 13387
hosting 1986 

The problem here is that too few people are actually searching with the term(s) the site is ranking well for. I suspect that Overture's figures are likely inflated by automatic bid managers checking ranks.

[przero2]

buckworks, are these numbers above per day or per month. the site also ranks well on the first page for discount hosting ..

[buckworks]

WordTracker says it's "taken from 301 million search queries over the last 60 days". I believe their sources represent about 3% of searches across the web.

The list above was what turned up when I did a query for "discount hosting". There are no searches at all reported for just "discount hosting".

Searchers simply don't seem to be using the word "discount" very often in conjunction with "hosting". It would be more productive to hone in on a different target.

[Jane_Doe]

I agree that Overture numbers often seem highly inflated. I think Wordtracker numbers are more accurate traffic predictors.

I would also suggest that you consider polishing up the title of your site to give it more of a professional look. Consider dropping the URL in the title tag, make the title shorter so it is not truncated in the Google description, clean up the grammar, and capitalize the first letter of each major word.

Check out the titles on Direct Hit's most popular sites (through MSN) for your keywords and see what your competitors with popular sites have as titles.

[WebGuerrilla]

Google's AdWords tool shows zero daily impressions for both "discount web hosting" and "discount hosting."

Overture is showing traffic for those terms because there are probably hundreds of other companies just like you running WPG reports containing those phrases against all of Overture's partners on a weekly basis.

You can find a bunch of past threads on the Overture's problems with automated queries in the Keyword Forum [webmasterworld.com].

[skibum]

In addition to the possibility of low search frequency, the listing itself could be more inviting. Listings 1,4,5, and 6 draw my attention more and look more professional. Like Jane Doe suggested, I'd go with something more readable and either take the URL out of the title or put it after the search terms or the phrase in the title.

[Jane_Doe]

Google's AdWords tool shows zero daily impressions for both "discount web hosting" and "discount hosting."

I don't usually check Google adwords, but doesn't it only track terms in blocks of 250? So if a term had less than 250 searches a day it would show 0 on adwords but could it still have 100 searches per day? If that's true, it's still not a lot, but maybe with a different title the page could still pull in at least some traffic.

I usually figure on getting at least one day of wordtracker traffic for every term that gets a top 10 Google listing. So with a title change I bet the site could get at least 77 hits a month. More if it could get it placed in the other search engines, too. Checking vivisimo only shows the site listed for Google "enhanced" AOL and not on MSN or FAST/Alltheweb.

[przero2]

thanks for all the comments and it is one more reason to come here when puzzled. we will change the web site title and position it for other keywords based on wordtracker (over overture i guess)!.

[przero2]

skibum, the site is relatively new and has not made into MSN, Alltheweb, AV, etc. hopefully soon!

[webman]

Another reason that you may be getting less traffic from Google than you forecasted is because Overture's traffic data is based on traffic mainly from Yahoo and MSN. If you go to Yahoo or MSN and type in your keyword phrase, it will come up at the top of the page, but it will be from the top bidder on Overture. By being number 1 or 2 on Google, you only come up on searches originated from Google (or AOL or other direct partners). Google users seem to be more educated and probably less likely to type in the term "discount web hosting" because they likely either already host their own website or they created their site before they started using Google.

Just my two cents....

[Robert Charlton]

In addition to checking the Overture suggestions page, I usually take a look at Overture itself. When the search phrases are bid up high, with some close bids, I feel that very frequent automated position checking is likely, and that the suggestion database is likely to be skewed.

In the case of discount web hosting, the bids are as follows:

$10.00, $4.24, $4.23, $4.22, $3.44, $3.25, $3.00, $2.99... etc.

You get the idea. These are close enough that there's probably frequent checking. Further down this string, there are even more closely grouped competing bids... and the bids go down for many, many positions, much more than usual.

I also look at the Suggestions for obviously spurious searches... I'll suspect an entire category if it contains too many repetitions of very unlikely combinations of words. The database is unavailable right now, so I can't check it, but I'm guessing this phrase set is heavily tainted.

[cagey1]

It is also possible that a pre-historic Overture partner has an Overture search box pre-filled with the phrase "discount web hosting". If the partner's website draws any kind of webmaster traffic, this could generate a significant number of clicks, whereas webmasters using the initially empty Google search box would not be prone to typing in "discount" before the "web hosting". In my experience, searchers are more likely to use the word "cheap", rather than "discount".

[fathom]

Also notice that in Google >> discount web hosting << has alot of sponsor links and many appear "more appealing" with FREE SETUP, FIRST MONTH FREE or FREE DOMAIN NAME.

In highly competitive listings (and high click throughs) the most appealing ones tend to draw the bulk of traffic.

In addition, most technical individuals usually know what hosts are available (they stick with what they know) so it is likely the lion share of statistical queries are webmasters checking their listings but more importantly to you, less technically savvy users.

Your... UNIX Shared Web hosting solutions are the most
economical, reliable form of web hosting. Utilizing AMD Duron ... may be scaring these potential visitors away because they don't know what a UNIX Shared Web hosting solutions is.

One possibility anyway.

[przero2]

Yes, this site needs a lot of improvement from an SEO perspective. We were actually surprised to see it in 2nd spot for discount web hosting (which has half million results) without any "optimization" (we are still working on it). After getting the 2nd spot, I was initially puzzled why the traffic was not trickling .. Now we know that the overture results were tainted and hardly any real searchers use these keywords ... Oh, well - we will have this site optimized soon and all your feedback and pointers thus far will definitely help the process ...

[NotNervous]

The site I see in your profile doesn't seem to have anything to do with hosting.