Targeting Keywords versus Targeting Traffic
Posted on August 15th, 2006by Michael Gray in Case Study, SEO
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In the olden days of SEO it was all about targeting the “right keywords”. You wanted to rank for [blue widgets] you put blue widgets in the right spots, your title tags, your meta tags, you looked for a density of x%, you put your keywords in bold and italics and things were golden. While things have gotten tougher it’s still possible to succeed with this approach. However the folks who are looking forward aren’t just targeting the right keywords, instead they are setting their sights on traffic …
What do people mean when they say target traffic instead of keywords? Well it means something a little different to everyone, but for me it means picking sectors that have a high search volume. A topic with a lot of searches will have not only a fat head, but a fatter body and longer tail, if you know what I mean. To better illustrate my point I’m going to show you what I mean with actual keywords.
If you’ve been playing the game for any length of time and as long as your hat isn’t alabaster in disposition,chances are you’ve got a few pages on mesothelioma somewhere in your portfolio. It’s OK to admit it, many of us do, it’s hard to ignore the call of keywords paying $20, $30, $40 dollars or more, it just seems like easy money, a dozen clicks a day and you could sip martini’s poolside without a care in the world. However lots of other people had the same idea in fact in Google right now there are 21,000,000 pages for [mesothelioma]. Sure some of you say well how many people are actually trying to rank for that phrase? Looking at [allintitle:mesothelioma] we see 930,000, to make the math easy let’s say you’re competing against roughly a million other pages. However how many people are actually searching for that phrase, according to Yahoo there were 240,000 searches in June of 2006.
Now I suspect many of those aren’t real people, looking at the recently spilled AOL data we see 51 searches from the 500,000 random searches. While you could make the argument that the AOL data is a random section of data, and the users may not be a technically savvy as many internet users (to which I would agree), having looked at a lot of the data I think it’s a really good picture of what ‘joe user’ is searching for.
So if I’m going to tell you what I don’t think you should be targeting what do I think you should be targeting? I think you should target phrases that regular users actually do search for. Want an example try [spiderman]. Spiderman has 28,000,000 pages which is more than the 21,000,000 of mesothelioma so where’s the logic in that, patience grasshopper. Looking at the [allintitle:spiderman] we see 666,000 pages so less people are actively targeting the phrase spiderman. Looking at Yahoo we see 355,000 searches for spiderman, which is more than mesothelioma again. Less competition and more traffic that’s a good thing.
Using the AOL data we see 291 searches for [spiderman] almost 6 times the number of mesothelioma. Yea, yea but I mean aren’t the AOL users dumb as rocks why would we want that traffic (he says satirically with a rhetorical tone)? Let’s look at Google trends … hmm more traffic again !
Ok how many videos are on You tube for [spiderman] over 3000 how many for [mesothelioma] 1 yep one. Ok how about myspace [mesothelioma] has 310 pages while [spiderman] has 169,000. Using del.icio.us [spiderman] has more actual real people bookmarking more pages than the SEO with multiple delicious accounts bookmarking their own [mesothelioma] pages.
Now about this time somebody is thinking to themselves sure but spiderman isn’t $20 keyword, in fact it’s probably under $1.00, and I’d probably agree with you. Here’s the thing, competing in a cutthroat space like mesothelioma means you’re going up against the big guns. There’s going to be a lot more “dirty tricks”, backstabbing, and spam narcing in that space compared to spiderman. If you’ve got the big guns and can handle the heavy damage from that level of competition go for it, me I’d much rather spend less time going up against lighter competition. So while you’re out fighting for one spot in mesothelioma I’ll already have my spiderman, batman, and superman pages going at full speed getting traffic. Once you’ve got enough “spidermans” pulling in the bucks you have the luxury of deciding is it worth going after the big bucks or not.
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August 15th, 2006 at 9:12 am
You are absolutely right. And if you have your traffic then you can play with it. Better have all sort of sites and combine them. Good article.
August 15th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
When I think of traffic I think of it in terms fo “traffic that converts” and preferably traffic that converts yielding some significant value.
So, in context, Spidy is nice but it’s a broad sweep and yes, that holds some potential. However, isn’t being a magnet traffic that converts - buy spiderman (whatever) - the real end game. Ya, give me enough traffic and I’ll sell someone something, but drill down a bit further into the game plan and allow me to be a loud sucking noise for the cream of the crop.
How do you manage to do that whilst remaining below radar? Now that’s an interesting question.
Care to share?
August 15th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Well you got your spider man t-shirts, wallpapers, mouse pads, screen savers, ringtones, baseball hats, underwear, sneakers, pens, pencils, book bags, notebooks, backpaks and hundreds more to choose from, which is an excellent way to utilize chitika.
You’ve also got a wide range of spider man characters good guys, bad guys, side characters, history, comic, comic covers, artwork, fan fiction, electric company episodes, cartoon episodes, universal rides, movies, DVD releases, DVD easter eggs, theme songs, and I’m sure there are many more I left out.
While you’d be best off starting small with less than 50 pages and growing slowly. IMHO the only time you need to stay under the radar is when you’ve got on your sombrero de negro. I’d also use subdomains to get the most value out of the domain ie spiderman.example.com superman.example.com and batman.example.com
August 15th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
I’ve found some nice niches that are extremely easy to do well in and can be quite profitable. However, the trick is to find a niche with enough related long tail keywords that you can rank well on for it to be profitable while climbing to the top. Personally, I don’t think that fighting for Mesothelioma or Viagra is worth it unless you have a ton of time and money to spend to get to the top, but if you focus your efforts on some other niche, you could be making some decent money while moving up the ladder. The sooner a site is profitable, the better right?
August 15th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
Is “spider man” and “spiderman” the same word?
Sometimes I wish I had it in me to spam something that would pay a few bills but taking advantage of dying cancer patients just isn’t my thing.
Spider
Man
August 15th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
it is to human but to a search algo it’s probably not …
August 25th, 2006 at 3:46 am
For those with cancer, mesothelioma is much more serious than a high paying google adsense keyword…
Mike