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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.
