Whilst researching keywords for some specific customers, it’s quite interesting to find how people are actually using Google. It seems it’s not just all about the single keyword anymore and people are more likely now to ask a question.
Perhaps the ‘Ask Jeeves’ campaign has actually worked, albeit on the wrong search engine…
When I analyse the keywords to use in a campaign, I go quite deep and use a wealth of tools that really dig into how people are searching and what they get back in results.
It seems that many people are using terms like ‘How to build a roof” and “I want a photocopier” with those small, seemingly throwaway words making it into the search term – but do they matter?
Well, you better believe it. You see, as I never tire of saying, Google is pretty stupid and their algorithms make no distinction between words in many cases. A word appears to be a word and if you are optimising for certain terms, the addition of a single letter can make a difference.
For example, type the word ‘in’ between the words of any search terms (of more than two words for the best effect) and you can get completely different results. “Ice cream in Weston” gives you a different set of results to “Ice cream Weston”.
Weird huh?
Well, not really if you remember that Google takes everything into account. If you remember this, you can actually leap in and grab some extremely lucrative keywords and get above the competition.
7 Responses for "I want a photocopier – and other search terms"
May 26th, 2009 at 4:26 am
The weird things people type into google. Actually, I find myself doing the same thing sometimes and then think about the poor person who might try to write a webpage around those keywords.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:28 am
If only all keywords were easily put into sentences. I like it when people write “in” and other small words like that. It’s much easier to optimize for.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:42 am
The article is usefull for me. I’ll be coming back to your blog.
June 14th, 2009 at 2:41 am
The article is ver good. Write please more
June 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
August 30th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Nice write up…usually I never reply to these thing but this time I will,Thanks for the great info.
September 28th, 2009 at 10:58 am
The biggest take-away for me was the impact of a good link from an online news source!
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