Monkeys Eating Red Bananas

A client emailed me the other day after discovering that her site came up high in the search engine rankings (1,2, and 3 in Google) for the phrase “monkeys eating red bananas” (I’ve obviously changed the phrase so as not to give any information about my client away).  She wanted to know how I thought we could leverage that phrase to drive more traffic to her site.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. Small business owners will monitor their site stats and notice a keyword or phrase that starts sending some traffic their way. They type the phrase into Google and, what d’ya know – they’re #1 in the rankings!

That’s great! Or is it?

Here’s what I told my client:

One component of keywords is the competition and where you rank in the search engines (ie. low competition, greater chance of being high in the search results).

Another, and more important, component is what kind of people is the keyword going to attract (and of course, how many). So think about people searching the phrase “monkeys eating red bananas” or some close variation thereof.

What are they looking to find?

What state of mind are they in (research vs. buying mode)?

Can you make some educated guesses about the demographics of people typing in that phrase?

I could go on. Bottom line – it’s great that to come up 1,2, and 3 in the rankings. However, if the term is unlikely to generate visits from legitimate prospects for your business, then it’s not worth your time trying to figure out how to leverage the traffic.

It’s not about driving traffic to your website, it’s about driving legitimate, qualified, and motivated prospects to your website.

I’d easily trade 1000 or more of the former for just one of the latter.

UPDATE: It took less than 7 hours to get the #1 Google ranking for “monkeys eating red bananas.” Won’t do me any good, but it does show that if you find a good search query that no one else is using you can be ranked high very quickly.

Successful Online Marketing Starts and Ends Here

I thought something had died in my front yard.

The smell was just horrendous. When I saw what appeared to be the source of the smell, I was even more disturbed.

Growing out of the mulch was a phallic shaped whitish reddish almost mushroom looking thing. Upon closer inspection (at least as close as I wanted to get!) I noticed there were a few of these alien like growths protruding out of the ground and there was no doubt they were the culprits producing that nose hair singing smell.

I didn’t know what to make of these things so I did what pretty much everyone does these days when they need information . . . I went straight to Google.

Not knowing what they were, I typed in the following search query – “stinky whitish reddish phallic looking things in mulch” and within a few seconds I had identified my problem – the aptly named Stinkhorns. Within a few minutes I knew more about Stinkhorns than 95% of people worldwide. I was a virtual Stinkhorn expert (not that that’s something to brag about).

What does this have to do with online marketing? It’s this . . .

The Internet is the greatest research tool that has ever been available in the history of the world.

That’s a good thing for Internet marketers because few, if any, things are more critical to successful marketing campaigns than research.

And research is the next topic in our Fundamentals of Marketing Online series. We’re going to look at what to research, how to research, and specific tools you can use to conduct your research.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

Research isn’t fun. It’s boring. It’s tedious.

But that common mindset presents a golden opportunity for you. Because once you understand the importance of research, once you understand how to do it effectively, and once you regularly incorporate research into your online marketing activities, you can easily out-market and out-sell all the competitors in your niche who are too lazy to take this critical step.

And I can’t think of anything more fun or exciting than that!