Half All Queries Are Unique? How Concerned Should You Be?
Amit Singhal, from Google, did a 50 slide presentation back in 2004, regarding the Challenges in Running a Commercial Web Search Engine.
Why am I covering it now? First, a member sent this to me to comment on, and I think it is rather interesting to see where things were then compared to five years later. Heres a hint: Not much has changed.
Question: How many queries are unique?
Answer: Over half
At first glance, you would look at that and think I have to do a better job of getting more keywords since users search patterns are not consistent.
Wait. After looking at the data from about 60 sites, here is an example from one of my typical sites.
108k visits from 28k keyword queries. Looking at it this way, it looks quite diverse, however, looking at the Top 100 queries, 56,656 visits came through. Which means about 52,000 visits came through the remaining 27,900 queries.
Am I optimizing for 28,000 keywords? Not even close. So how do you improve your chances of coming up for many of the phrases which may never come up on an analytics report or during keyword research.
If I can quote Dan Thies, Use modifiers aggressively.
What are modifiers? You already know them, but probably by a different name.
Examples of common modifiers are:
- best
- buy
- cheap
- discount
- wholesale
- online
- accessories
Modifiers allow you to expand your keyword set. So instead of having just blue widgets, you would have discount blue widgets, blue widget accessories etc. Geo Targeted (San Francisco, bay area, Chicago, etc.) would also be classified as a modifier.
