Making Trade-offs – Update on Baseball site
Posted on April 22, 2007
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After making good progress on the term ’softball gloves’ I realized my client and I were faced with an interesting question. To proceed with our quest for this one phrase or to expand our efforts to move on other, potentially more lucrative, phrases. We chose the latter.
But before we get into that too deeply, I promised to reveal what is working as well as what doesn’t. When I last posted we had fallen back into #50 for our term softball bats (see my post: The Trials and Tribulations of Google Bounceback). I was expecting to make up ground lost when we had fallen to that position after getting as low as #36. Well to try to spark additional advancements, I went ahead and changed the title tag and placed two text links on the home page to interior pages. And then we fell to #80.
Whoops!
Not sure if it was a larger component of the Google bounceback in positions that we had already seen, I sat for a week. During that period, we slowly climbed back to about #74. Not too impressive. This was clearly a message from Google to me that we had now moved to an over optimized state on our homepage. So I went and removed the text links that I had placed and made a small revision to the title tag and we immediately moved back up to #59. Today we are at #47. I made another small change to the title tag last night and am waiting to see what impact that will make on our progress.
The key here is to keep a low profile on the key phrases you want to rank on. Try too hard, and you are sure to trip a filter with Google and see a set back.
Now back to the initial subject stay the course to rank better on ’softball gloves’ or go after an even bigger money term, ‘baseball bats’. When I had last posted about our #50 position on ’softball gloves’ we were at #118 for the term ‘baseball bats’. A great position for a new site with only 3 months of SEO activity but not close enough to ‘go for it’. Well the site naturally drifted to about #91 and I figured it may be time to give it some attention. Now by so doing, we’d have to sacrafice some forward movement on the ’softball gloves’ term but given a signficiant traffic volume difference, we decided to go for it.
Today we are at #66 on Google for ‘baseball bats’ Not too bad I think. Of course the glory and the monies hit when we get to page one. Which brings me to another point. How does a site make money if it’s out of reach for traffic on any major search term? I mean I’m pretty vocal about how I think doing analysis on long tail keywords is a waste of time so does this site make money?
In a word – yes. Here’s what’s happening. First, we get a fair amount of long tail without trying. As I’ve alway maintained, there is nothing wrong with long tail traffic, just don’t spend time trying to chase it. You will be surprised at what pages will just rank naturally and will find that many long tail phrases that real people visit your site on don’t exist in the databases of any of the keyword tools out there.
Secondly we have already nailed (page one of Google) a number of 2nd tier phrases. By that I mean we rank on page one of Google for the following terms:
- Cheap baseball bats #2
- Cheap baseball gloves #2
- Cheap softball bats #8
- Cheap softball gloves #6
- Discount softball bats #8
- Discount softball gloves #8
- Cheap catcher’s gear #1
- Cheap baseball gear #1
- Cheap baseball equipment #3
And there is just as long a list of Google page 2 positions on 2nd tier phrases like Glovesmith Gloves, Discount Baseball Bats, Discount Baseball Gloves and many more.
But here is the important point, these 2nd tier phrases end up being only about 10% of the total traffic. The other 90% is coming in from naturally dervived long tail phrases, the ones we didn’t work for. Pretty cool huh?
Well that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more progress as we move this new site even further!
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