570-983-0575Matt Cutts brings up a great point on “trophy phrases” that I always try to follow. A trophy phase is a specific key phrase that people sometimes get hooked on especially those outside the SEO world. Without ranking high for this one specific term, they will not get any organic search traffic and their website isn’t working! That simply isn’t true. There is likely another problem if conversions aren’t where they should be.
I have a good example from an actual client I was working with. A few weeks ago we compared their website against a few local competitors in the industry. One specific local competitor was ranking very well for a trophy phrase with “Pennsylvania” in it which is great for them. Or is it? This site was for sure getting many more views as there are many more viewers in Pennsylvania as a whole than just specific parts of Pennsylvania. However, was a visitor searching with the term Pennsylvania who was from the other side of the state more likely to convert than a visitor who is just miles away from the business searching with a local SEO term? No.
Without getting too specific, it was a local service business who was more likely to convert a visitor who could see an employee face to face or at least know they were only a few miles away, not on the other side of the state. When I researched some local SEO key phrases without the state name, I noticed there was almost no competition. I added some cities, counties, and other local terms into my SEO of their site and what do you know, within only a few weeks we have top 3 results for almost all of the local phrases. After analyzing some Google Analytics reports we noticed that many of these phrases even began converting in that short period of time. Visitors were searching for these local terms and actually finding what they wanted.
My point in all of this is that instead of focusing all of our time on that one trophy keyphrase, do some exploratory research into some other easily converting options. When it comes down to it, does ranking really matter for that trophy phrase? Or is the number of conversions on the site more important?
