Thursday, March 5, 2009

One Word Rankings


Well now, it's been quite some time since an article was posted on here so I feel like I owe everyone something really good.

It's common in seo to make suggestions to potential clients to not go after that elusive one word phrase. But by doing so, and with seemingly all seo professionals on board, has it gotten easier to get ranked for one-word phrases?

I've personally have been able to get some top rankings for clients of mine within the past year - I'm not saying this to brag, but if everyone's drinking that kool-aid, how will anyone know how hard it is to go after one word?

Now, there are those that will tell you that a one-word phrase doesn't convert. In my experience, these phrase drive a ton of traffic to the site (as much as up to 10k unique visitors a day) - of course not all of them convert.

But about 20% do.

Yes, 20% of all people coming in on a one-word phrase converts at that rate for something on the site. Maybe not for the phrase that brought them in, but that person converts on something.

Now, using WebTrends or Google Analytics will tell you the phrase on which the person came in from, but to get the granular level detail, the only system I've been able to come up with and rely on is a site database capturing system. It's been custom created, but it can track all the pages visited and will tell you that if someone originally came to the site for the term "KVM" but ended up buying USB Cables, that data is retained.

Now, all of a sudden, those one-word phrases are looking pretty good. And, with soo many seo's purposely not going after them, I think it presents an opportunity to grab those top rankings for those magical traffic drivers.

So, go get those words!

-To your online success!

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