I wrote about my first encounter with the wonder wheel in my post “Wonder Wheel : LSI“. There, I revealed that what I learned in my researches about the matter I am not necessarily applying in this blog, as this is purely a personal outlet for me (that I prefer to be not limited and boxed-in by seo rules). I however have applied whatever knowledge I’ve gained (at this stage of my (ad)venture online) to other projects of mine and found that, to some considerable degree, they worked.
One great use of the wonder wheel is to discover keywords that are directly related to other keywords, much like LSI. Some sources revealed their technique of finding a profitable keyphrase that has lots of traffic and most particularly has a high CPC (for purposes of earning with Adsense). Then they say that for this particular keyphrase they can stop caring about the competition. Why and How? The method is to input the keyphrase unto google search and look at its wonder wheel elements. The circumferential keyphrases (I just used ‘circumferential’ because of the circular arrangement of the other keyphrases around the main keyphrase) are then analyzed for number of searches and, this time, competition. The object is to find as many keyphrases that has considerable searches but less competition no matter how little the CPC may be. A keyphrase with very low CPC tends to have less competition, even if it has a considerable search count. If it is not found in the current wonder wheel, the search is expanded into the adjacent sub wonder wheels.
Having collected the sub keyphrases that are related to the main keyphrase (the one with the high CPC), the next thing to do is build a blog for the main keyphrase and blogs for all the sub keyphrases. The technique aims to draw traffic from the sub keyphrases (which as earlier mentioned have low competition, considerable traffic, and probably low CPC) and pass them to the main keyphrase (which has high CPC). The purpose of the sub keyphrases’ blogs is just to draw the traffic, so no adsense blocks are ever shown on these blogs. Only the blog for the main keyphrase contain adsense blocks.
Usually the sub keyphrases’ blogs are free blog types, e.g. wordpress, hubpages, squidoo, myspace, etc. The blog for the main keyphrase may either be a hosted one with its own domain, or also another free type blog.
Does The Wonder Wheel in SEO Really Help?
While I agree that it makes sense and theoretically should work, so far, I’ve never come up with a project that followed the above procedures to the letter. I even later on heard of some negative feedback about this technique. However, in most, if not all, of my projects, I’ve always remembered these things and would implement something similar but usually not completely like it. In cases where all the sub keyphrases (the ones surrounding the main keyphrase in the wonder wheel) are all highly competitive, I tend to just mention these keyphrases within the main page of the main keyphrase blog or site. That is, I scatter these sub keyphrases among the contents. I suppose that when google crawls the site and finds all the sub keyphrases mentioned in it, it will decide that the site’s author really knows everything about the subject matter of the site. The wonder wheel, by the way, came out around a year ago and google is probably done with any testing phase it put it under, if any. So, for whatever purpose it serves them, google is probably totally comfortable with it.
While I could not exactly say how much it contributed to the success of my projects (because it is mixed with other sensible SEO techniques), I definitely believe that it played a considerable role in the present serp status of my projects.