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I was analysing my logfiles from the last 2 months, and what really is amazing to me, is that more than 60% (yes, 60%!) of my traffic from SE's are coming from people who have searched for things I never thought one can search for such obscure things - they search for things which I even had forgotten about that I had them on my site!
My main keywords make only 30% of all traffic (the rest are links from directories and other sites). But it really doesn't matter, because I have on *each page* links to the important parts of my site, and users usually visit those parts.
So, be sure to have real, good, nice, much content on your site, this is maybe the most important point in your work. My brother has a site with 30 pages, perfectly optimized, and for most of its top keywords it ranks very high and well, but it doesn't get the super-perfect traffic, because people just don't search for the "normal things" we think.
It might mean the difference between being 5th and begin 1st.
However if the term is "widget blue UK England Essex parts" you may have some difficulty! :)
Scott
more than 60% (yes, 60%!) of my traffic from SE's are coming from people who have searched for things I never thought one can search for such obscure things
Yes, it always has been thus. It obviously depends on what sort of web site you have, but if you have a tourist site, for example, people will search not just for the location, but for something specific within the location.
So if you competitor is hogging the listings for "widgets, Essex" then you can pick up a fair amount of traffic from those looking for "blue widgets Essex", "widgets Romsford Essex", "quality widgets" and so on.
I personally think webmasters tend sometimes to concentrate on the one word keyword search.
I sometimes wonder why some who post here seem to focus on just one term when measuring how well their site is exposed in SERPS. To us, their is a gaggle of good terms at the top of our referrer term list that Se referrers come from, but they still only represent less than 20%. The other just over 80% come from "untargeted" but often very relevant terms, from which we get one to three a day, but as i said this very very long list accounts for 80% of SE referrals.
Naturally there are a few main keywords that I aim for - and others that dont bring much traffic, but i want to be number 1 for all the same (just out of principle - brand name for instance).
If I notice a large amount of traffic coming in for terms that i dont optimise for, i tend to aim for number 1 on those keywords.
Scott
Also I suspect searches like: "retail finance job in Milton Keynes" is going to be a better person to pick up (if you can deliver) than just picking up some idiot who just did a worldwide search on "jobs" :)
Only 33-odd million sites competing!
Worth a shot anyway! ;)
Scott
widget for removing gum off of the bottom of my shoe
can widgets remove gum from shoes?
gum removal using widgets
get gum of your shoe
remove gum from my shoe
gum stuck to shoe
how to remove stuck gum
I know my examples are crazy, and I get a kick out of some of the terms we get hit on. It is a large percentage of people who are not searching for the top words.
my main keywords are "adobe photoshop" "web design" and "graphic design"
When I finally got access to my logs, this is what turned up:
Top 20 of 3520 Total Search Strings
# Hits Search String
2.56% free website templates
2.12% photoshop 7.0 tutorials
1.72% pegasus
1.54% photoshop buttons
1.32% wood texture
1.19% web design portfolio
1.12% photoshop 6.0 tutorials
1.01% website tutorial
1.00% photoshop tutorials
0.89% nebula
0.76% photoshop 6.0 tutorial
0.75% website templates
0.62% free website template
0.61% web buttons
0.53% photoshop tutorial
0.50% Photoshop 7.0 tutorials
0.47% how to make buttons
0.46% adobe photoshop 7.0 tutorials
0.46% free web templates
0.40% photoshop wood
Scott
I am by no means the biggest fish in the sea, although I am trout-sized :P
Are you a free website templates site?
hehe
My site is about hiking up various mountains, and I used to think that people would come to my interior pages searching for "Mount Widget" (I have many pages devoted to sepcific montains and the trails on them). Very soon my logs told me that many were searching for "hiking mount widget", which I had thought redundant since my whole site is about hiking. So I made sure that the word "hiking" appeared more than once on each page.
Even though most of the mountains I describe have unique names many people were searching for "Mount Widget, My State", so I started making sure that both the full name and the two letter abbreviation of the state was prominent on each page.
A few weeks ago I found several searches for "elevation Mount Widget". They found me because each page has a table of elevation gains for each hike, but I made sure to repeat the word a few more times.
None of this has improved my ranking on the various "Mount Widget" searches, but I am sure that it has increased the total number of people who find my site.
Quite true - a while back I was doing some Overture listings and was using the keywords help thingy. I was surprised at what came up for many terms - for instance, a surprising number were doing a search for such things as "12 volt widgets" and "widgets for boats". Turned out that most of those type key phrases had few or no bids, so I used them all.
I just checked last night, and even though their occurance is rather low (perhaps from 20 to 300 a month), the CTR is very high - over 40% on some.
Since then we have also started going back over our pages for many of those type items and optimizing each page. I takes time, but our sales are up almost 100% over last year for this month.
Perhaps searchers are getting more savvy about how to use Google, and being more specific. In fact, we have deleted a few of our high cost "semi generic" keywords that had a high CTR but poor sales ratio. We are getting more hits and spending less.
I have to agree about the diverse range of keywords that a content rich site can pull traffic from. I'm always literally amazed at the hundreds of different keyword combinations per month that people utilize to find some of our sites.
In fact, one of our sites did extremely poorly on our two main key phrases, yet we ( from what I've been able to tell ) pull at least twice the traffic than other sites that are optimized soley for the main key terms.
The problem that I've just spent the last month addressing, in fact, is that we SHOULD be listed in the top three for these main terms: Widets, Widgets production, and Widgets use. Our primary problem has been an index page that is too long, with too many repetitions of the primary word in our key terms.
This is certainly a site architecture problem, though I was slow to change it, even after pouring through Brett's wise advice. I don't like people having to click through more than once to find the information they are looking for.
I have found it is far easier to optimize shorter pages ( 300 - 700 words ) than longer ones, and yet I've been very hesitant to take the design one step further, with sub-content pages ( ie widgets care page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ).
I can't tell you how many navigation systems I've gone through in the last two years!
I've just recently employed a three-level site architecture hoping to address our problems with the main key terms, and changed the site design to allow for easy adjustments.
It's too early to tell the SERP consequences, although I have already seen an improvement for one key term by about 30 positions on google; evidently a fresh-bot rating.
I think providing quality and original content should be what websites are all about. It's like having your own publishing house, and even commercial sites can better serve their customers by providing rich content.
In fact, if I visit a site these days, and I don't see content, I wonder how much the business really knows about their own products and/or services!
- Jason
One of the manufacturers that I deal with is an interesting case when it comes to content. He has a wonderful new product, that combines a widget and bangle. It is named the widgle as a combination of the names. But in most cases the people that would end up buying the widgle are actually those that would be looking for a blodget. The think is that he hates for his product to be compared to the lowly blodget so much that he refuses to even mention the blodget on his website.
He is so stuck on his fancy name and his patent pending idea, that he doesn't even realize that the only people that will search on widgle are those that already know the product name, which is all that he will try and optimize for.
I'm guessing that he would have an order of magnitude more business if he would swallow his pride in the semantics and just put up a comparison page between the widgle and the blodget.
Another manufacturer has been trying to improve his traffic and kept working on his main keyphrases. The problem is that he was already #1 & #2 in most of his main keyphrases. I suggested that he start including content and user stories about using his product in different conditions. This can add a few hundred different keyphrases a month, that might only add 1000 visitors. But that is 1000 visitors that you didn't have last month.
His product can be used in many different conditions. If he can pick up some of those people searching on those conditions without ever mentioning the product type, he might be able to convert some of those that had never thought about it to using his product.
Ken
widgets
wiggets
wigdets
wigits
wijits
whidgets
and widgettes
They all get hits.....
Also good to note if you do see unusual terms appearing in your logs to optimise pages for them too.
A while back, I noticed a phrase in my server logs that caught me by surprise. It turned out that people were searching on a certain topic and being referred to one of my pages because of the geographical reference. I didn't actually have anything on that topic (except for one link to an external Web site), so I quickly wrote an article with the information that searchers were looking for. The page is now one of the most popular entry pages on my site. (In fact, it's one of the most popular pages, period--it's in my top 10 or 20 pages most days.)
