Snake Oil SEO | Keyword Research

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Yesterday I was sent a link to a video about a couple that traveled around the US for a year

My wife and I have been throwing around the idea of creating a mobile studio so we could take short trips to the Oregon Coast or where ever we’d like. The whole project is to be able to take our whole studio with us with out packing it up and unpacking it when we get to the hotel.

This other couple actually did this for a year. Sometimes they slept in the van and sometimes they used a hotel. Well… when I finished watching the video I visited their website then checked out their web person.

Snake Oil SEO

The web person was making all sorts of claims about what she could do for you and your website. She said she could do SEO so well she even touted her google rankings on some of her websites. She even has client testimonials about what good rankings she got for them. Something here hinted of snake oil to me. Many people are not aware that google will personalize your google searches for you. If you visited a site many times and run a search that site will be listed, google’s personalization will give bloated results for that site. I have a search plugin for Firefox that will circumvent googles personalization. I searched google for the terms she was using and she was close to the search engine ranking she quoted.

Snake Oil SEO from www.workingwebsolutions.com/

Keyword Research

My intuition was still screaming Snake Oil! I decided to investigate the value of the search terms she was using. I wanted to know how many people were actually using those terms on a daily basis. I use NicheBot for my keyword research it is a very reasonable priced tool and they have a full use trial version for only a buck for two weeks.

Well my my intuition was right on the money. Here are the statistics on what I found:

In a search on google for “Hip Kid Clothes” the web site shows up on the first page in the #1 position — Results 1 - 10 of about 2,430,000
Hip Kid Clothes - Predicted daily searches 0

In a search on google for “Hip Kid Clothing” the web site shows up on the first page in the #1 position — Results 1 - 10 of about 2,360,000
Hip Kid Clothing - Predicted daily searches 0

In a search on google for “online baby birth announcements” the web site shows up on the first page — number 3 out of 2,330,000
online baby birth announcements - Predicted daily searches 0

In a search on google for “online birth announcement” the web site shows up on the first page — number 3 out of 2,340,000
online birth announcement - Predicted daily searches 2

In a search on google for “golf pilates training” the web site shows up on the first page — number 1 out of 1,170,000
golf pilates training - Predicted daily searches 0

In a search on google for “pilates training” the web site shows up on the second page — number 18 out of 2,050,000
pilates training - Predicted daily searches 7

Many so called SEO experts really don’t have a clue when it comes to keyword research. What good is ranking #1 for a term only you search on. Anyone with the ability to read can promote a sites ranking very high for a keyword or search term no one else even has on their site. “hjfowefihweo” It would be easy to rank #1 for “hjfowefihweo” but what would the benefits be? Being able to say you are #1 on google?

Good keyword research will pay off many times over. If you are going to go spend the time and effort to get good search engine rankings it is probably a good idea to use words and phrases people are actually entering into the search box.

late,

gary pool

This is a post from Gary Pool’s Search Engine Optimizician&trade blog.