RelevantText.com

The hidden value of low value search terms

August 24th, 2009 Jason Posted in seo | No Comments »

What’s the point in ranking #1 on a term nobody searches for?

You see this all the time, people bragging on digitalpoint that they’re #1 for their target term. What they never say is quite what that term is.

In the quest for traffic, you can aim for a slice of a competitive term, or you can look for opportunities with little or no competition and build your own market. Ranking number 1 is easy – the value is in getting people to search for that term.

I’ve had a music blog for a while now, occasionally showcasing some new band I’ve found. The name derives from the title of a song by a band I like. I looked up this morning and found that I am now sitting comfortably at #1 (and #2), overtaking all the sites referencing all the lyrics sites and the band itself. Well, that’s great. But what’s it worth? Less than a visit a day.

So how do I improve on this?

• More regular updates – my wife updates her theatre blog at least a couple times a week. More updates mean more crawls and more visibility for more terms. Individual posts easily land on page 1, and searches related to the shows we’ve seen drive far more traffic than do searches for the name of her site, which is also comfortably number 1. Relevance isn’t just about keyword usage, it’s about being timely and topical as well. I admit, I haven’t posted an update in over a year, so I’m losing out on the fact that fresh content encourages traffic. One of the bands I wrote up 2 years ago is now up for a Mercury award. When I first posted the review I hit page one with minimal effort. Maintaining the momentum in the intervening time could have paid off mightily in terms of traffic.
• More visibility – more content will generate more readers and more links and ripple into more traffic. New bands are hungry for good press, and getting a post referenced on a band website or myspace page can mean thousands of new eyes seeing the name of the site as a viable source for information. There’s also the knock-on effect that more readers mean more people who know the name of the site, and thus more likely to search for it.
• More links – generated through more visibility, and through more active self-promotion. It may be a term nobody searches for, but so was the word ‘google’ at one point. Building the site as a brand means building the awareness of the brand term, which in turn will encourage more searches for the term and more traffic associated to it.

Ranking number 1 for a junk keyterm isn’t actually valuable by itself, but in the process of building a site as a brand, sometimes it’s a good start. Now that I’ve got the top spot, my challenge becomes building the brand and traffic to it, which will be far easier than trying to start off trying to rank for a more competitive term like ‘music blog.’ If the site takes off based on the merit of the content, over the course of time it will begin to register for broader and more competitive terms on its own. I’ll end up with that traffic anyway. I’ve just come in through the back door.