June 11, 2008
Boy Was I Wrong, I Think
Back in November/December I was looking to optimize my partner's daycare site for the search engines. It was my first foray into Search Engine Optimization (SEO
I went to SEOBook and compared the results between 2 finalist keywords - "daycare" and "child care". SEOBook had "child care receiving about 1/3 more searches than "daycare".
I went to WordEaze and compared the 2 terms, just to make sure. Again, "child care" was a slight leader.
Fiona (my partner) told me that daycare was a better term to go with.
I decided to go with the data and not the gut instinct.
I optimized and changed the site for the winning term - "child care". I changed the resource boxes to every url included the term "child care". We've sent out loads of articles and built more incoming links using this term in the anchor text.
Last week, I started testing a campaign with AdWords and I have two separate ads groups. One concentrating on "daycare" and the other on "child care". The keywords are exactly the same, just substituting "daycare" for "child care" in most every case - ("start daycare" becomes "start child care", etc…)
Generally, the keywords appear generally in the same position, though the child care group has a slightly higher position (4.6) than the daycare group (6.4).
The daycare group had received 3 times the amount of impressions of the child care group, in spite of the higher positioning (making it less likely the ads would appear on the 2nd page).
Boy do I have some egg on my face.
There's a difference between hard evidence (actual searches) and the guesses of even the most trusted companies.
Has anyone else seen a difference between what was reported by the tools and what actually happens?
Popularity: 24% [?]
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign up for my blog announcement list over on the right. Thanks for visiting!
Filed under Traffic by Steven Lohrenz
Comments on Boy Was I Wrong, I Think »
Robert Phillips from Make Money Online @ 7:48 pm
Well I've been wrong lots of times and in particular about SEO but not quite the same way you mention. I just thought I would get more traffic by ranking in to top 10 for search terms that get a lot of searches. Don't take that the wrong way…I get most of my blog traffic from the search engines and my blog announcement list has been growing faster since I've had top 10 rankings. So I'm not complaining and it's been worthwhile to learn how to get high rankings….aIt's just that I'm not getting the "tons" of traffic I thought I would get.
Matia @ 9:40 pm
I started a website on a favorite hobby of mine although WordTracker said the main keyword gets only 100 searches a month. I created only one link to the website from another website. In about 3 months the website ranked number one for the keyword and was getting about 4000 pageviews and about $30 dollars a month in AdSense. That experience plus my Adwords experience has taught me you really cannot tell what a keyword will do until you try it out.
Bryan from home based business @ 6:24 pm
Hey Steven,
I know quite a bit about Adwords.
Some things you really need to consider before coming to any conclusions:
1) A term, no matter what the traffic, may get much better conversions. Someone searching for "daycare in Los Angeles" will convert better than "daycare" by a factor of maybe 300-500%. You may be better off with a much longer tail KWD (plus it's easier due to less competition).
2) You may be budget limiting yourself without you even knowing it. If your budget is set low, Google will show other sites instead of yours on higher traffic kwds. (same goes for quality score)
3) If you're using broad or phrase match, there may be a ton of searches for something you don't even think about like the movie "daddy daycare" or something like that therefore it is a) showing your ad a LOT more than it should and b) makes your average position higher because "daddy daycare" is less competitive.
My advice: create an adgroup with one keyword in it: [daycare] and another with [child care]. Then set their budgets really high. Watch it closely, and you'll see what the results are.
Feel free to email me if you want help.