I Am Not Impressed

I recently saw this old school ad… I laughed, and this is why.

The site authors seek to impress us by showing how well they can get a site to appear on the first page of Google. They want you to believe that because they can show first page search results that their service is valuable. However, the terms used in the sample video were obscure and had low competition values. In some cases there was no exact phrase match for the term used. What does this mean… any living creature with fingers and able to type could get the same results. Let's look at an example.

Let's say that you live in a tiny town like Collbran Colorado with a population of 388 and decide that you want to rank #1 for a search phrase like Collbran Law Firm. A quick check on Google will show you that there is a total of only 2660 pages that contain the three terms in our phrase. An exact match search using quotes around the phrase will reveal just 1 search result. This is because just one page out of 63 billion web pages contain those three words in order. So of course you can quickly rank on the first page of google for that search term just by having that phrase on your page.

What's missing from many of these videos is the keyword research conducted before video production, KW research designed to find extremely obscure or easy terms to rank.

Competition value is important to guys like me that perform the work relating to affordable SEO, this is because some terms are extremely competitive and next to impossible to rank, we prefer terms that have fewer competitors yet still have a decent search volume in order to keep new visitors coming into the site.

Search Volume? Search volume is the number of times any given phrase is searched for on the web. Obviously competition matters little if there no one is actually searching the web using your chosen search phrase. So sure, anyone can rank for a low competition phrase that contains no search volume, but if you want to impress me, then show me ranking within a competitive market or niche, and show me some search volume to match it.

That's my 2 cents, keep the change.