There is not a day that goes by that I don’t see a webmaster cackling about how they have the #1 position in Google for a broad search term with millions of competing pages.
Why just today I saw a tweet come across my deck gloating about keyword success for the broad keyword phrase online seo marketing and it only took them 2 months to get to the #9 position. 2 months! Btw- I couldn’t find this website in the first 5 pages.
Lets take a little closer look at some data for this search phrase.
Broad match:
Phrase match:
Key for screen shots:
SEOT – Estimated traffic if in the #1 spot
PBR – The percent of broad-match searches versus phrase match
SEOC – Search engine competition
SEOCT – All in title competition
OCI – Commercial intent
As you can see the search volume is very low for broad match at 118 total searches a day while phrase match is only 7 searches a day.
Looking at the PBR percentage only 6% of the words in the keyword phrase are used in this order. Just for reference I wouldn’t target any keyword phrase with less than 55% PBR.
The competition (SEOC) is over 2 million pages. A lot of noise there.
The SEOCT shows around 537,000 pages use the exact same phrase in their title. This is actually a pretty high number which usually indicates you would have to do a lot of work to beat out 500,000 other pages using the same keyword phrase.
So at the end of 2 months the webmaster would enjoy a healthy 2 visits a day for the phrase match “online seo marketing”. Not much traffic for all that work they had to do to beat out 2 million competitors.
While it is true that you can hold the top position in search for unique keyword phrases, most of the time these phrases have a very low search volume. Although it is perfectly fine for a webmaster to celebrate keyword victories, from an international search stand point it’s hard to get excited about a keyword phrase that only brings a few visitors a day.
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