Rankings or traffic

When you’re optimising a website for the search engines, it can be easy to lose sight of why you’re doing it. Some people become so obsessed with ranking first for their chosen search terms that they forget why they’re even pursuing that in the first place.

Think for a moment and you’ll say that it’s to drive large quantities of traffic to your site. More specifically, you want to drive large quantities of targeted traffic to your site. That’s the ultimate aim when you set your site up to rank for a specific search term, but it’s not the only way of achieving that and if you focus all your efforts on that approach, you could end up overlooking others that could be equally productive.

While ranking first for your chosen search term might net you a few hundred or a few thousand visitors a day, you could receive an even larger amount of traffic by hoovering up less competitive search phrases and ranking for those.

The less competitive a search phrase, the easier it is to rank for it. The majority of terms entered into search engines are longer, less predictable phrases and the best way to appear in search results for these is with content. Produce regular, unique content and you’ll find you rank for all sorts.

As long as the content you produce is related to your industry, all this traffic is good and focused and just as much use to you as any you’re likely to receive from the key phrases you’re deliberately targeting. Why rank first for one term when you could come top for hundreds?

Alex Bowden
Creative Developer