Search Engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Does Good SERP Ranking Guarantee Loads of Traffic?

You've really been doing your SEO homework and your site has been creeping up page by page. Finally your site is on the first page of Google for your keywords. But you're more than disappointed with the low amount of traffic from all your efforts....

We need to define some terms about SEO before we dig into the possible reasons. Here are three you must know before dealing with search engine placement:

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. This is the science of getting a web page to rank high for a particular Keyword or set of keywords.

SERP: Search Engine Results Pages. These are the pages a search engine returns as the result of a search. Our goal is to get our pages to place near or at the top of the results so that more people will find our sites.

Keyword: the words or phrase that you want a search engine to associate with your web page and return your web page when someone searches using that term. For example, if you're selling red left-handed widgets, then your keyword phrase would probably be red left-handed widgets.

You may have read my first paragraph and said how can that happen? I think everyone assumes that if they finally get a web page on the first page of results that they've hit the traffic jackpot. But that's not always true.

Below are some reasons you may not receive the traffic you banked on:

Your web page title and/or description are not readable and appealing to a real person. If you put some words together to rank well in the search engines, they may not read well to a human and therefore does not cause a person to click on the link to your site. Remember, a real person reading your web page is the end result you're aiming for. Make sure your web page titles and descriptions are engaging so that you will motivate people to click, click, and click.
Your site is listed at or near the bottom of the first page or search results vs. the top of the first page of search results. The first site on the first page receives an order of magnitude more clicks than the last site on the first page. The closer your page is to the top the more traffic you'll get.
You picked keywords that are not being searched on. You must always research your keywords. It's too easy to think you know what people are searching for when you could be wrong on what the best terms are for your site. If you find this out months into using those keywords, it's bad news. It's easy to edit your web pages; but changing the inbound links to your web site can impossible. Why do you care about inbound links? Search engines, put a very high value on the anchor text in the links to your site. Let's say you've spent months getting links to your site using the term "Red Left-Handed Widgets" because when you searched for "Red Left-Handed Widgets" on Google, it showed 944,000 results. Later, you finally use WordTracker and check how many people search for "Red Left-Handed Widgets" and you find that nothing shows up. Now, you need to find a better keyword phrase that people ARE using when they search for products or information like yours.

Here's an example. I helped a blog owner with SEO for one of his sites. In this example, I'm leaving off the name of his blog and the keyword terms. For this example, I did the research using the free version of WordTracker.

He wants to target 3 keywords:

Keyword 1:

Wordtracker: 0 entries in its database, 0 predictions for 24 hours
Google: 2,490,000 sites
Site is on the 3rd page of results on Google (near the top of the 3rd page)

Keyword 2:

Wordtracker: 23 entries in its database, and 4 predictions for 24 hours
Google: 77,100,000 sites
Site is on the 3rd page of results on Google (near the top of the 3rd page)

Keyword 3:

Wordtracker: 21 entries in its database, and 3 predictions for 24 hours
Google: 67,100,000 sites
Site is on the 5th page of results on Google (near the bottom of the 5th page)

Based on this data, I suggested to him that he had selected the wrong keywords. I tried several different keywords with WordTracker and found a different mix of phrases that show more predicted searches.

My suggested Keywords for him to use:

Keyword Phrase 1:

Wordtracker returned 590 entries in its database, and 94 predictions for 24 hours
Google returned 397,000,000 sites

Keyword Phrase 2:

Wordtracker returned 12 entries in its database, and 3 predictions for 24 hours
Google returned 2,470,000 sites

Keyword Phrase 3:

Wordtracker returned 0 entries in its database, 0 predictions for 24 hours
Google returned 2,490,000 sites

The first two keyword phrases I suggested for him are new, he wasn't using them before, and my suggested third keyword phrase is actually his old first phrase. Even though my suggested third phrase shows no results I kept it in the mix because it's exactly what his site is about and the first two will bring in traffic.

Remember that I did this research using the free version of WordTracker which only gives data for MSN; the full version gives information and predictions for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. The number of predicted searches will be higher on Google vs. MSN because more people use Google to search.

The Accuracy of the keywords you select is important. I'd rather get a handful of interested site visitors than a thousand uninterested visitors. Had I suggested keywords that were not relevant to his site, visitors arriving at his site would not stay long, and they would not purchase much of anything either.

In addition to keyword changes, I suggested some changes to the HTML for his web pages. It will take a week or two, sometimes three to see the resulting changes in the search engine rankings. It'll take longer to get links built using the new keyword terms.

Summary:

Select keywords that people, real people use.
A page needs to place high on the first page of results.
Your web page content must be related to the keywords(s) being used.

Suggestions:

Use a good keyword research tool like WordTracker.
A service like 3WayLinks.Net works wonders.

ENTER MAIN SITE