Tiger Woods Can’t Help You: The Myth of The #1 Rank and The Keyword Solution

posted on Dec 04 by Tim Conley in the Local SEO category

Do you want to rank #1 on Google, Yahoo! and Bing?

I’m frequently asked by prospects if I can guarantee them a number one ranking in the search engines.

The prospects who typically ask for a guarantee have run into disreputable SEO companies.  The SEOs know that the layman wants to rank #1 so that is what they pitch.  The prospect, not knowing enough about SEO to make an informed decision will base their decision on price plus promise of #1.

During the consultation I have with prospects, I tease them a bit saying I will guarantee them hundreds of number one spots; however, they may never see any traffic from those rankings.  Just because your number 0ne doesn’t mean anyone is searching for that particular phrase.

Good SEO companies typically get many number one rankings for their clients, but they do it for targeted traffic without doing “black hat” tricks, which could get your site banned from the search engines.

THE KEYWORD SOLUTION

Good SEO is all about getting targeted traffic from keyword phrases that have search volume.  Targeted traffic is searchers looking to buy your type of product or service or researching information on your type of product or service. Getting traffic from people looking for Tiger Woods gossip won’t do much if anything for your business unless you sell Tiger Woods paraphernalia.

Once your targeted keyword phrases are identified, you need to determine if they have enough volume for the effort required to rank.  Volume is very important since SEO really is a numbers game (get more targeted visitors to your site you have a greater chance of making more money).  Usually, but not always, the higher the volume of searches of a keyword phrase the more effort you should put into ranking for that term.  If you have a choice between getting 1000 visitors per day or 100, you should work on the phrase that gets 1000.

Here’s where the but comes in.  If there is a lot of competition for that phrase, denoted by the number of pages returned by the search engine, you may have to work too hard to rank for those 1000 visitors where as it might be easy to rank for 10 keywords that each get 100.  For local businesses, I typically try to rank my clients for keyword phrases that have less than 350,000 pages returned before going after more competitive terms.

Note: The right mix of keywords, competitiveness and volume differs based on the client. For national clients these phrases would be more long tail/third tier keywords that we would go after much later, but for local clients there is little need to try to rank for highly competitive/high volume terms with searchers from all over the country or world (ie. not targeted).

I hope this helps you get better grasp on search engine optimization and helps you make a knowledgeable decision when you hire an SEO firm.  Any questions?  Please connect with me through the comments section.

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