Wetsuits for ducks – what do you mean?
We often see emails from anonymous ‘online marketing businesses’ promising guaranteed top ten rankings. While most of these emails come from these anonymous entities in India and the US recently a client had a direct approach from a UK company saying they could guarantee top of Google positions, for a fixed cost and quoted one of their clients in their email. They even stated the keyword that a current client was number one of Google for. And you know what, they were. So they must be great yeah?
The keywords they were promising and giving as examples were regional variants – e.g. wetsuits for ducks London. They said they had got their client number one on Google for more than 20 of these terms. Before we go into the reality of this situation it is worth pointing out that our, and all other ethical and quality SEO company’s process starts with keyword research. The point of keyword research is to understand what terms will be best target from a business fit, level of competition and crucially from the volume of searches per month. We do this by entering a term like “duck wet suit” into our software tools and then look at the data for that terms and terms like it. If a term fits the business and it has the volume of searches to make it worth targeting then it’s in the mix and we work to get our client to the top of Google for it.
So what’s search volume got to do with wetsuits for ducks?
Coming back to the guaranteed number one on Google offer – its not hard to get number one on Google for a search term if no-one is searching for it and no-one is targeting it. How can we be so certain? Well search for “wetsuits for ducks” on Google now and see what’s number one. Yep this article. Great? No, because no-one searches for wet suits for ducks. The point of search engine optimisation is to get a profitable return on your marketing investment. You do this by being visible at the top of Google for terms your potential customers use. Those terms with the most searches are often the most competitive, but the results of achieving the rankings are worth the investment. Investing in swimming gear for an aquatic bird is pretty pointless, just as investing in keywords that no-one searches for is pretty pointless too. So next time you get an email saying that can guarantee you number one on Google for a fix price just remember the wetsuits for ducks and hit Junk.
