Pet Phrases, the thorn in my industry. Clients sometimes have the unrealistic goal of ranking on ONE phrase and ONE phrase only – their “Pet Phrase”. If that phrase isn’t on the first page of Google, then in the client’s mind, their site = epic #fail! Ugh! As you can read here, having your eye on one phrase and judging the worth/efforts of your SEO campaign is not only an unrealistic goal, but isn’t what SEO is all about. A Pet Phrase can be a subset of a realistic more SEO savvy goal, but one phrase when I have thousands to play with??? Come on! That’s just not what we do.

As Jill Whalen put’s it (a industry rock star who’s been in the biz since day one):

No SEO company in the world will be able to help you unless you are ready to forget about what you think you want, and learn more about what you really need.

Remember… you hired US to be YOUR experts… your pros! When we do keyword research to see what humans actually type in a search engine, it’s for a reason and why you pay us very well.

Case and Point

Client had a pet phrase and considered their whole SEO campaign a TOTAL #fail. When you look at the referring keyword phrases for the first month after on-page SEO, there was a whooping 32 unique referring keyword phrases. Jump ahead 6 months and we now have ~5000 unique referring keyword phrases. These are phrases that your site didn’t have traction on before you came to us. Not #fail. The unique visitors increased and the contact form was filled out a good amount of times. Just because you’re not #1 for “my fuzzy purple widget” does not mean the project has failed. You simply need to be educated on what to expect and how to interpret your metrics. Learn what a true goal is and how to lead your potentials TO your goal. Your pet phrase should never be the focus of your organic search engine optimization efforts because in all actuality, people are using many more, many different phrases to find your site. SEO beauty.

The Goal

This end goal of optimization is to create an awareness in the search engines for your site – yes, this is what we do, bring more potential clients/customers to you. In fact, we bring more people to your site on phrases that you’d never even consider. This happens due to what I call the *black box of phrases*. YOU are the expert at what YOU do and most of the time you use an industry specific jargon (whether you realize it or not… it’s not a bad thing as long as you keep in mind that there are other phrases that people think of when looking for your products/services). Regular Joe (or Joette) doesn’t know your industry well nor the jargon you use… but they KNOW WHAT THEY NEED. Be prepared for a wake up call when you look at the phrases that were searched upon that led to your site… it’s a real eye opener (and fascinating to geeks like me)!

When you become a client of ours, you’re sent a focus list and a business analysis form. You fill out what you deem are important phrases to your industry; phrases YOU want to rank on. Don’t get me wrong, those phrases are IMPORTANT but sometimes they don’t have a high search volume. Enters SEO copywriter. Your gold, your secret weapon. After thorough keyword research (based upon the focus list you filled out) we determine the BEST phrases for your site in order to accomplish your goals (more traffic, more clients, more purchases). If we were to optimize a site for Pet Phrases alone, all projects would probably be an epic #fail.

The “Mix” Tactic

One way to make EVERYONE happy is to do a mix of tactics:

1) get client ranking on their pet phrases (even if the search volume is nil)
2) get client ranking on phrases that people actually search on

Keep in mind that if the pet phrase happens to be extremely competitive (highly competitive != highly searched upon!) it will take some time to achieve traction in Google. We can work with the researched phrases and utilize our tried/true methods to get you that traffic while working on the efforts of the pet phrase. People have the NEED to see their pet phrase (no matter how bad of a choice it is) on top of Google. Hopefully, we’ve educated our clients to understand the difference between wanting that pet phrase and obtaining ranking on great phrases that’ll bring them new clients.

Managing client expectations is critical during the initial stages of an SEO campaign. We’re not miracle workers, but we’re pretty darn close

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve handed off a list of referring phrases to a client only to hear them say “people actually search on that??”. Yes! Yes they do! In fact Google claims that 20-25% of the phrases people search on have NEVER been searched on before. That’s HUGE! Do you want to miss out on all these phrases? Of course you don’t! With good copywriting you’ll find yourself ranking on phrases you’d never imagine and then some. Yes, these might be long tail phrases, but they’re phrases someone searched on and found YOUR site; they were looking for YOU. Collectively, these phrases bring you a lot of very valuable targeted traffic (and typically these phrases have a higher conversion rates because they’re so specific) as people are searching on exactly what YOU offer. That’s what it’s all about!

When you put an ad in the newspaper (are those still around?) there are thousands upon thousands of eyeballs that glaze over your ad EVERY DAY. They aren’t looking for your services and may never need your products. Heck, they might not even understand what you do (like my mother!) However when someone searches on:

Chicago Accident Lawyer

they’re looking SPECIFICALLY for JUST THAT. That type of phrase will drive targeted traffic to your site and there’s no other advertising medium in the world that can do the same thing (much less track it!)

So please, next time you get in a ruffle about that Pet Phrase, step back and look at the big picture. That’s the one that matters. If your sites gets 5000 unique visitors a month yet doesn’t rank #1 for that Pet Phrase, we’d call that (in Charlie Sheen terms) WINNING.

Other articles about *Pet Phrases*

Is Your SEO Campaign Out of Focus?

Search Engine Optimization – Are You Optimizing For the Wrong Keywords