Myth 4 – Targetting A Few Keywords
Video Summary
Have you ever heard a “guru” saying to target just a few keywords and get top search engine rankings for them? I sure have… all the time. In fact, some marketers make a mint from selling you keyword research software to “uncover” the “best” keywords.
Don’t Do It!
If you target specific keywords, your writing will be un-natural and you’ll miss out on hundreds or thousands of free visitors from long tail search results. In the video I show you that the 37,700 people who visited my site from search engines used 10,500 DIFFERENT search phrases!
That blows my mind. How can there possibly be over 10,000 phrases in my UK-specific technology niche? Not just that, but my 5-month-old site RANKS well enough for those 10,000 phrases to have received at least one click for each phrase!
So, whether you write articles for your websites, or posts for your blogs, be sure to use as many theme keywords as you can in a natural style. You’ll reap the rewards in ranking for many, many different keyword phrases.
What do you think
Have you tried to get traffic for one keyword at a time and seen poor results? Will you now try to write broadly and generate traffic from hundreds or thousands of keywords instead?
Hi Neil
What a shocker! Now we know why we’re not get enough traffic.
I found I was getting ranked for keyword phrases that I wasn’t even aware of, made my hours of learning about SEO rather pointless. Having said, that my content is unique.
Still, I wish I had your sort of traffic numbers.
Look forward to more helpful videos.
thanks
Graham
Impressive! I’m interested how this is affected by what Matt Cutts has said about the algorithm change or ‘MayDay’ and its effect on long tail keywords. As I understand it, he has said that long tail has suffered – although I don’t see that on your graph, so you must be doing something extra-right.
This may help some who have not seen or heard about “Mayday”
1. Mayday: how Google’s May update will affect your long tail rankings
In an online forum, webmaster discussed (http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4125460.htm) their experience with Google latest ranking algorithm update that has been given the name Mayday. If your website gets fewer visitors from Google, the update could be the reason for that.
What exactly has happened?
Many webmasters have seen a huge drop in traffic from Google for keyword phrases that are three or more keywords long (so called “long tail keywords”).
Google algorithm update
Some webmasters have lost 90% of their traffic from Google because they cannot be found anymore for the long keyword phrases.
The ranking drop did not happen to spammers. Among the affected websites was a 13 year old site with a Google PageRank of 7 and 400,000 backlinks.
Why did it happen?
It seems that this is not a penalty but a change in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google might now be able to index longer keyword phrases more accurately. There’s a new Google patent that deals with this topic.
Identifying phrases requires a lot of computing power and a lot of memory. A webmaster explained it in the discussion:
“For example, on the assumption that any five words could constitute a phrase, and that a large corpus would have at least 200,000 unique terms, there would be approximately 3.2.times.10.sup.26 possible phrases.
Clearly more than any existing system could store or otherwise programmatically manipulate.”
It seems that Google guessed the best pages for long keyword phrases until recently based on other signals and keywords on the indexed pages.
The new Google patent indicates that Google now has the computing power to index longer keyword phrases on web pages instead of guessing them.
Do you have to change your web pages now?
If you experienced a decline in traffic to your website from Google you might have to change your web pages. For example, if you want to be found for “personal injury lawyer london” then these words should appear in that order on your website.
If you use other variations such as “london lawyer personal injury” then you’ll probably get listings for that variation but not for other word combinations.
Yes but what about the content ? With 10,500 DIFFERENT search phrases used to visit your website it must have tons of content right ?