In SEO, you can always say it again

It never ceases to amaze me how people find Web sites through the most obscure queries. You can do all the keyword research in the world and conclude you’ve never every logical phrase and expression people would use to find content you create and then look at your search referrals and see queries you never even imagined. I’ve been studying search referral data since first reading about it in 1998. Search referral strings provide you with an endless supply of active query ideas.

On a large content site you’ll get thousands of 1-hit referrals every month. It’s time-consuming to sift through the referrals to find queries that are well-used but for which you have obtained only marginally useful rankings. Nonetheless, you can turn Web site traffic around if you reoptimize some of your content (or add newly optimized content) to focus on those once-obscure referrals. A mere casual reference in one of your articles could align itself with the latest media buzz and you’ll suddenly be an Internet superstar as people find your site.

In the past I have written about the “golden page” effect, where a page you didn’t expect anything from rises out of obscurity to become a search engine sensation because people suddenly start searching for that exact content. But mining your search referrals doesn’t produce golden pages. It only helps you practice better search optimization. The difference is that you have to make an extra effort to improve the performance of whatever page is being found through obscure queries. With a golden page you don’t need to do any additional optimization.

Here are some example keywords that people have recently used to find content on SEO Theory:

1. on page optimization checklist (the page was optimized for “on page optimization seo checklist”)
2. page level seo techniques (there is no one best article but the Content Theory category rounds up a lot of them)
3. relation between links and seo (although the Link Building and Link Theory categories may be better choices)
4. competitor seo analysis (although the Competitive SEO Analysis category might be better)
5. advanced seo (although the Advanced SEO category would be better)
6. all about link building (although you could learn all about link building from our Link Building category)

So you wrote an article about “fishing through holes in the ice” and someone found it with the query “ice hole fishing”. Hey, cool. But when you search for your page in the results you don’t see it anywhere. What’s up with that? Could be normal churn. Could be they had a different data center than you. Could be they’re using a different search tool than you are.

You can rewrite the article, write a new article, or point some links at the old article with the new keywords as anchor text (which I’ve done here). None of these techniques by themselves will guarantee you improvement in your search results. This is where the SEO Method comes in to play: you experiment, you evaluate what happens, and (if necessary) you adjust what you’ve done.

Before rewriting an article or writing a new article, your easiest path to eventual search results improvement is to point some new anchor text at your old content. There’s nothing wrong with expanding the scope of your inbound anchor text, especially if it’s relavent to the topic and you feel the article really does provide a satisfying user experience. Of course, in our industry, nearly everyone decides that the merest mention of a keyword on a page makes it relevant and worthy of ranking first for a query. That’s not quite what I have in mind, but see what you can live with.

Revisiting old topics through new links and new copy reinforces your perceived authority on those topics and keeps your passion engaged. You can help yourself more easily through consistent gentle reminders to your readers of past activity than by begging for links from other sites. If you show people you’re serious about a topic, someone will eventually link to you with relevant keywords anyway.