I’m just writing out some observations I made after checking the stats lately of one of the few business sites I’ve created a few months ago. I have yet to analyze these data. But I just am posting these right now and hope to make a follow up post after my analysis (which may take awhile, considering that I am allotting for these tasks only a few hours a day).
If you jump back a few months ago to my post about my ‘Update to Keyword-In-Domain-Name Experiment‘ post, you’ll see that I made a rather detailed account of what I did, novice as I am, to my very first business site to bring it from nowhere to #2 in the google serps. This site is the very same site I was talking about in my post called ‘The Power of the Keyword-In-The-Domain-Name‘ when I tested the veracity of what I’ve been reading everywhere being preached by the gurus. I can never thank MNF enough for giving me that first green keyphrase and my ‘First Step Up Google’s PR Ladder‘ excitement . I was just lucky enough to have a friend who gave me time to play awhile with his Micro Niche Finder on his laptop. After finding how cool MNF is as an SEO tool, I decided thereafter to buy a copy for myself (although I could have just continued using my friend’s) in order to thank James Jones. It proved to be one of the very best investment I’ve ever made.
I started out working on a 3-word keyphrase that glowed green in MNF. Most bloggers/webmasters by the way, when they talk about their seo experience, for whatever reason (competition?), never reveal their keyphrases (although some do). I think a struggling newbie like me would be better off sticking to the same policy. So, let’s just symbolize my keyphrase with a dummy phrase like, say, ‘robotic swing arm’. The root keyphrase ‘swing arm’, although it has a tempting high search count, was very competitive and was colored red in MNF which means ‘you’re out of your league here, go find another less competitive phrase’. So I settled for the longtail ‘robotic swing arm’ because it was as green as an empress’ jade pendant, although it only has a search count 1/10th that of ‘swing arm’.
Long story short, my seo efforts brought me a little success. Number 2 in google. There were even a few days at a time when it tiptoes at number one, only to rest back to number 2. Then lately, I found that my site has begun to show up in the google searches for the 2-word keyphrase ‘swing arm’ although I did not do any seo work specifically to rank for that keyphrase. Yesterday it was #19 out of 17,300,000. It looks like my seo efforts to rank for a 3-word long tail keyphrase produced a side effect of raising my hopes to rank at the 2-word root keyphrase. I run MNF again and checked out this 2-word phrase’s data. It’s SOC (strength of competition) value is a whooping and glaring red 1000! Green SOC values range from 0 to 50 only. Now I ask myself, do I have a chance at landing within the first page of google if I focus my seo work on this particular phrase? MNF’s SOC tells me it’s a difficult climb (SOC 1000). Even Traffic Travis showed a Difficulty Rating of ‘Extremely Difficult’. Market Samurai also threw an extremely high SEOCTR value of 186% (low seoctr, say 0% to 7%, means weak competition). It’s like, everywhere I turn, everybody tells me ‘you can’t do it’.
Like I said earlier, I have yet to give these observations a little more attention. If some of you have had experiences that run along these lines, you could probably cut short my analysis time by giving me advise based on your experience. What do you think?