Hi Marshall and Gary here,

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we often see the claim “we will get your website to rank number one in Google“. This is, in itself, an admirable desire and can get significant visibility for a small business. However, it is an often abused claim from marketers as the mere ranking at number one in Google just means you have caught the eye of the spider for the searched words; it does not mean huge amounts of business will roll in through the internet.

The missing parts of this online marketing equation are:

• How many people are searching for the keyword
• How relevant is the keyword to your business

Obviously the greater the number searching, the better. And the more relevant the keyword to your business, the better. But any claim on keywords and Google rankings without reference to these 2 key metrics is ultimately meaningless from a business perspective.

Let’s look at some examples of what we mean.

Small Business Internet Marketing ranks number one in Google Australian page searches for “commercial keywords”. This, by the way, is not by design. When we analyse this keyword, we see that only 4 searches are done a day that include “commercial keywords” so we never have tried to optimise for it. However, we do rank number 2 for “small business internet marketing” which is something we are optimised for and has considerably more searches each day.

We do find that some people mistake the available results returned by Google as highlighted here as the number of searchers for the keyword. Let make it clear that this is merely every page indexed by Google that has “commercial” and/or “keywords” in it, plus anything else that Goggle believes is relevant. You often see the mischievous claim like “…out of 538,000 searches on Google, we rank number one…” with the implicit suggestion that this site somehow will get a huge amount of traffic. No, no, no, no, no! It is not searches, it is results returned by Google.

Another site that we have seen says it ranks number one for “male run business support” – which we do not doubt. Unfortunately, our research shows that this keyword has absolutely no searches for it. The fact that Google returns some 86,000,000 results is not relevant, the fact that no-one is searching for it is highly relevant. As a keyword, it has low commercial relevance (OCI of 36%).

It is also worth considering what is a reasonable volume of searches for keywords. For someone pursuing an affiliate marketing strategy through using pay per click Adwords, volume is the key. The greater the volume, the more absolute conversions into sales (provided the optimisation is effective). On the other hand, we have done work for small consulting businesses specialising in a niche market. In this case, a search volume in Australia of 2 per day is more than acceptable if you only want to have 10 clients.

So let’s state for the record what is relevant for a keyword strategy:

1. They must have reasonable search volumes (relative to the business)
2. They must be relevant to the business (an aquarium shop optimised for “business suits” is not a great strategy); and if both these are met
3. A high Google ranking for your site on the keyword

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary