The Power of Keywords and a Jolly Conundrum

Written by: Karin Pinter
May 10th, 2010 at 10:00 am, filed under Search Engine Optimization

A website can be well optimized for a particular industry, but what happens when two seemingly unrelated industries cross over? You get a whole bunch of traffic you really don’t want… and a funny language dilemma.

While reviewing a client’s traffic and keyword reports for April, a strange peak in their site’s visitor trends caught my attention. Towards the middle of the month, their traffic increased dramatically, then returned to its normal pattern. No new content had been added to their site during that time, no newsletters were sent out, and their last blog post of March 31 would, if anything, have shown a more immediate increase in traffic within the first few days afterward, not 16 days later.

So, I revised the keywords for those days during which traffic soared, and realized that a significant amount of the terms by which traffic was reaching the site were not related to the client’s industry whatsoever (unless you stretch your imagination a little).

The client in question is a life coach in London, providing additional consultations in Barcelona & Madrid. The site is optimized and positioned for ‘life coach’ and ‘life coaching’ in these three cities so as to reach those particular audiences.

Now, generally people in England travel by ‘coach’, not by ‘bus’ (this is where the language cross-over potentially affects traffic). So on occasion, I’ve noticed random visits from people searching for ‘coaches from london to barcelona’ filter through to the website – so few they were of no real consequence, and somewhat inevitable by the sheer nature of how search engines can regurgitate their own keyword references by which to rank a given page.

Then I remembered that the volcanic eruption in Iceland occurred mid-April, and realised that during those days, when travellers in Europe were unable to travel by air and resorted to travelling by land, the resulting traffic to our client’s site was in fact a direct correlation in related searches for ‘coaches from london to spain’, ‘coaches from barcelona to london’ or ‘coaches madrid to london’. Obviously a coach with wheels and a coach with a plan of action will get you from A to B somehow… yet this was not the kind of traffic our client was looking for. The volume of demand to cover that isolated need, however, temporarily outweighed the searches for our client’s specific offering.

This simply goes to show that no matter how well optimized your site may be for your particular industry, if your terms are similar to those of another kind of service, you may still get undesired traffic that may send clouds over your results (pun intended).

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