Proof of The ABSOLUTE, CRITICAL Importance of Keywords to Online Success

I know I keep going on about keywords and their importance in driving traffic to any website both through Pay Per Click campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation approaches. I do this because understanding the role of keywords is the single most important part of any web design or internet marketing project.

Real Data from a Real Site

To drive this point home I would like to share some real data with you from one of my sites. The site is related to a gardening topic and is one of 150 websites that I own.

The period covered is the 4 months Jan 1 2008 to April 30th 2008 (4 months). The graph above shows the relevant data. In total there were 85,308 visitors to this site over the period. The vast majority,66,556, of these visitors came from free organic search results (no PPC campaigns at all have been run for this website). This means about 80% of all visitors came from FREE search engine traffic. A breakdown of results from all different search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ananzi etc, shows that82% came from Google alone.

Here's the astounding truth ...

The 66,556 visitors used 38,991 different keywords between them to find my site...as shown in the above image.

What's even more staggering is that the top 10 most important keywords only drove 6.75% of this traffic as shown in the pie chart below.

So What Are The Implications?

1. If your website does not have lots of good quality content covering many keyword options it is impossible to get lots of free traffic. Websites with few pages, or websites consisting of mainly images or short product descriptions just cannot succeed in attracting lots of free traffic from search engines.

2. If your website is only optimised for the top keywords you will miss massive amounts of traffic using what are known as "long tail keywords" ... ie the 3 and 4 word phrases typed into search engines.

3. Websites have to be optimised for Google since that is where most people go to search.

4. The only other cost effective way of driving lots of relevant traffic to your website is using Pay Per Click.

5. If you think you might need some help to get similar results you're free to chat with me to see what we can offer. Call 011-454-0105 (Tony)

Take a Look at Your Own Website

Every website automatically has access to stats like this. Do a similar analysis on your own site and see what you can conclude.

If you don't know how to get these stats for your own site give me a ring 011-454-0105 (Tony) and I'll point you in the right direction.