Keyword rankings are flawed.

Everyone’s search engine result pages (SERPs) are currently being personalized based on the following information:

  • Your past browsing history
  • Your physical location
  • And your social media connections

That means the individual keyword rankings are personalized too. So you and I, searching for the same keyphrase, will undoubtedly see different results.
But wait, it gets worse…
Keyphrase-specific data is disappearing at an alarming rate. That means when you login to Google Analytics (or any other popular analytics program), your organic keyword data is getting lumped under [not provided]. And Google is also stripping away the ability to target very specific keyphrases in their own AdWords platform — instead forcing you to target a broader group of related phrases (and thus paying more for less targeted results).
With all of this in mind, your SEO keyword strategy for future growth is most likely broken. Here’s why, and how you can fix it.


What We Can Learn About SEO Keyphrase Strategy by Analyzing CodelessInteractive.com Organic Search Data

One of the primary roles of organic search is to provide new targeted visits to your website. That means figuring out ways to bring new, interested people to your site with the (a) ability and (b) willingness to eventually give you money in exchange for something.
With that in mind, we analyzed our own website’s performance to determine which pages were the most successful, and why (in terms of Reach — i.e. impressions, clicks, and new visits). We looked at the 770 reported keyphrases in Google Webmaster Tools that sent us at least 1 visit.
From May 17th to Aug 14th of 2014, the two most popular blog posts were focused on:

  1. Launching a new website
  2. Generating website traffic




Top 2 blog posts receiving organic search traffic from May 17 to Aug 14 2014

But here’s the surprising (or not surprising) result… there wasn’t just one or two keyphrases responsible for all of the search traffic to these pages.
In fact, there were more than 10 individual, yet closely related keyphrases sending traffic to each of these pages.
Taking this a step further, here’s how much traffic the most popular keyphrase for each page sent (as a percentage of total new visits):

  1. “how to launch a website” – 6.67%
  2. “generate traffic” – 6.50%

So what does this all mean?


3 Takeaways to Update Your SEO Keyword Strategy

Tip #1. Instead of over-prioritizing individual keyphrase data, we should focus more on overall landing page and content performance.
That includes:

  1. Researching groups of relevant, related keyphrases
  2. Figuring out where these might apply to potential customers in the buying cycle
  3. Setting up and tracking relevant business or marketing KPI’s (like revenue, leads, or pageviews) for these pages, instead of “leading indicators” like keyword rankings.

Tip #2. Increase “Reach” by expanding your website to target and engage people earlier in the buying cycle through popular, unbranded topics.
To increase Reach (i.e. Impressions, Clicks, and New Visits from organic search), you typically have to research and incorporate more “unbranded” keyphrases (and pages!) that target users earlier in the buying cycle (like in the Awareness stage). These people won’t convert immediately, but are cheaper and easier to reach than the more competitive, commercial topics.
Tip #3. Successful SEO today doesn’t just mean SEO.
Google continues to remove or reduce important keyphrase information because these changes (a) make it harder for other companies to compete with Google AdWords, and (b) forces their own customers to spend more money on the aforementioned AdWords. Effective? Yes. Evil? Probably.
But it can actually work in our favor.
Because while great SEO hasn’t changed all that much in the past few years. Bad SEO has.
Search marketing shouldn’t exist on it’s own in a silo or vacuum from the rest of your organization. The SEO process is dynamic and interrelated with other various inbound marketing methods. And it’s not something you “set and forget”. There’s a constant need to research, analyze, create, optimize, promote. And then do it all over again.
So even though Google’s changes make it a little harder to figure out the minutiae of search engine optimization, it also forces you to be more holistic and focus on the big picture…
Forget PageRank. Forget backlinks. And forget keyword rankings for a minute.
Because none of that stuff really matters.
What matters at the end of the day is whether (a) you’re bringing in new, targeted people to your website on a consistent basis, (b) if these people are having happy first experiences and (c) if — and how many of these people — are becoming a lead or customer.
Ultimately, improving those three simple things are what separates most companies from profitable growth and stagnating sales.
Not PageRank. Or backlinks. And definitely not keyword rankings.
Areon Reviewed by Areon on . How To Fix Your SEO Keyword Strategy When its Broken Keyword rankings are flawed. Everyone’s search engine result pages (SERPs) are currently being personalized based on the following information: Your past browsing history Your physical location And your social media connections That means the individual keyword rankings are personalized too. So you and I, searching for the same keyphrase, will undoubtedly see different results. Rating: 5