Do you wonder why you are not getting any sales when after you have done research on a certain keyword and your finding tells you that there are tens of thousands people searching for that keyword every month? The hits are there to justify that the keyword does indeed have search potential, but the sales are not forthcoming.
It is actually not due to wrong keyword research. It is due to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the keywords on our part. No matter how good you are at tracking down high traffic keywords, there are times that you will get so excited over a certain keyword that you forget to ponder as to why that keyword gets searched by so many. If we had researched further, we would have found out the reason why.
There is something known as a trend keyword and with trend keywords, there are daily trends, weekly trends, monthly trends, festive trends, periodic trends or even yearly trends, just to mention a few. Many bloggers chases these trends and if a trend is hot, they can get huge amount of traffic and make tons of money.
However, trend chasing is tedious as you must be always on your toes, keeping up with everything new, every minute. If you are late in posting a trend that is sizzling at that particular moment, others would have beaten you to it.
That’s where keyword research goes wrong. A keyword may be getting thousands of hits daily because it is a present trend. If we do our keyword research during that period of time and we hit upon that keyword, we will probably think we have landed ourselves a goldmine. The next thing we know we would have bought a domain that contains those keywords, put in the relevant contents, patted ourselves on the back, and gone to sleep with a huge smile on our face.
So far so good, if you are into Adsense. You don’t mind those 10 cent clicks as the volume will be enough to make you some decent income. Even if you do not realize that this is a passing trend, and traffic will whittle down to nothing in a couple of weeks or months after the trend dies down, you would have made yourself something.
On the other hand, if yours is a product site, selling something, then you will be disappointed. Trend traffic are almost never buying traffic. I remember sometime ago, when I stumbled upon the keyword, “crystal skulls”. I too thought I had landed a perfect keyword for “crystal skulls” is an item and if thousands are looking for such an item, they should be looking to buy that item.
I was a fool in not doing further research before plunging headlong into buying a domain with the words ‘crystal skull’ in it and putting it up with all the ebay links for that product. Like i said, I went to bed smiling, anticipating big sales in the days to come. They day never came.
It was after a few weeks that I finally realized why.
At the time I was doing my keyword research, Steven Spielberg just released his movie starring Harrison Ford titled, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. As both these guys are international super stars and the movie is a blockbuster, everyone in the whole wide world was searching for terms related to the words, ‘crystal skull’, thus hiking the word sky high but catching me flat footed.
A lesson learned, but not well enouigh, for I went on to make the same mistake many times again after that. I never learned to contain my excitement and look at things with a clear mind. Maybe I just have a crystal skull, or I am a numbskull.
I once managed to place a page of mine 1st on Google for a term I thought had 50K of searches and nearly no competition. Not only that, but 8 of the other first ten were links to my page.
Turns out there must have been a glitch in the keyword search I did as there was no traffic for that phrase at all. None. Zilch.
The only thing that makes me feel better is there are now a bunch of other sites trying to rank for that term. They can have it.
Always double check your keywords.
Hi James,
Sucks doesn’t it. All the trouble only to realize it’s for nothing. LOL
Good to see you back.
What about a 17mil monthly searches keyword with a wide range of competition. Although the keyword would be like 96% of the domain name, it will not be an easy task to rank it, would it?
Offtopic: Can you investigate this page: http://www.awesomenewbietraining.com/
just for 2-3 days I was directed to at least like 5 of them, for different topics, Online TV, HD Movies, Internet Jobs etc, the page is empty on info , just useless links and ads.
Is that something like a ad page or something that is gaining speed?
A keyword with 17mil searches will naturally be stiffly competed. You will have to snoop around those in the first page of SERps and see what you are up against. If you see you have no way of beating the top 3, I would say you move on.
By snooping, I mean, see where the top 3 are getting their inbound links for that keyword. See how many links they have pointing to them with that keyword. Check the PR of those incoming links, the age of the site giving them the links so on and so forth. If you have the resources to beat them at every corner, then you will take over their SERPs position.
There are some exceptions though but it will be quite lengthy to describe, but you get the general idea.
About that site, they are obviously trying to bait for clicks. All those are sponsored links and with every click, they will be making some money.
They mass spam people in every way, whether by email or via your comments. It’s is an unethical way to make lots of money, especially if those ads are PPC. Out of the thousands of emails or comments they sent out, few hundreds will be clicking on the Ads so you do the maths.
That’s kinda dumb…. I spend like 5 minutes looking exactly where the online TV channels were and after all I left and I will never ever go back
Who would even click or return?
About the the keyword, hmm the top sites are supposely very very old since Internet existed probably
. They are manufacturer sites I guess it would be hard to beat them.