Analyzing a particular keyword phrase and conclusions

This article I call it an experiment that I want to share with you. The information that I want to present here is meant to clear some things and also pose some questions on how do you achieve a good ranking in Google on a certain keyword phrase. I choose this keyword and thought that everything will have a logical layout that will allow me to draw a conclusion but it wasn’t. So, lets see what are the results and discuss together the conclusions.

The keyword

This whole thing started from a supposition : if you would have a marketing company in San Diego for example you would like to target “San Diego marketing services”.

The keyword is relevant to the business – this is certain. It’s a long tail keyword which theoretically will increase our chances to get a high ranking in Google if we optimize the page for this keyword. Aaron Wall from seobook.com said in a recent article that in the case of long tail keywords the optimization of the content plays a 50% role in getting a high ranking.

So let’s take a look to some of the data for this keyword :

• search volume per month : 720 (is not much but for a new website this is fair)
• Google competition : 9,770,000 (which is pretty high)
• from all these 9,7 million pages only 1,500 targeted the keyword in their titles and only 360 pages had that keyword in the URL of their page

I’ll stop for a moment and take a look to these results. From a theoretically stand of point the competition is not that high (judging by the number of pages that target the keyword in title and URL). But still there are other factors that can turn the situation. And here I’m talking about the age of the website, the Google Local and the incoming links that a certain web site might receive.

So, right now I would say that if you play your cards right and target the keyword in the title of the page, in description metatag, in the URL of the page, in the first and last paragraph of the page along with some natural uses in the middle of the page, in the text of links from that page, on subheadings – you could do it; you could be on the first page of Google for that keyword.

But lets take a closer look to how the first page in Google looks for that search (performed on the US Google). First comes the results from Google Local, then sandiego.craigslist.org/ma/ followed by mjemarketing.com, evisibility.com, sandiegointernetmarketing.com, rickydeez.com, bestrank.com and the list goes on. I will not talk about sandiego.craigslist.org/ma/ and I will stop to mjemarketing.com .

Why is this website here, on the first page. You know how many incoming links this site has, according to Google ? An incredible number of 0 (zero). I click the link and to my surprise this is a html page that loads a flash website with no content at all on the first page. It has the keyword in the title of the main page and in the description metatag but other then that, there is nothing – at least this is happening at a first view.

The only text on that page is the keyword metatag(which Google ingnores) and the description metatag, along with a very long title. So why is this website there ? And the only logical explanation to me is that this website is also registered in Google Local with the name MJE Marketing Services(so it has part of the keyword). It doesn’t contains the keyword San Diego but it doesn’t need to, because it’s in the proper category.

Another important element to observe is that the websites that I mentioned above have a decent age. Mjemarketing.com is from 10-2000 while the others are from 2001, 2004 and 2006.

I think the major element here is the way this website is registered in Google Local. I think that is what makes it to be where it is. My suggestion to someone that would like to be on the first page for this keyword is this :

• register in Google Local with the appropriate keywords;
• create a page that has content relevant to the subject and that also targets the specified keyword;
• try to get some incoming links to that page; you can try to do this by submitting an article that talks about this to some article websites and link to your page from there.

If you have anything to add, please do. If you don’t agree with me please say so – but in a civilized way.