James: James Schramko here, chatting with Gert Mellak from SEOLeverage.com. And I do have a question about targeting for SEO because I think a lot of people make listings. They want rankings, and they want traffic. But I wonder if that’s definitive enough? And are we actually able to laser-sight our targeted traffic? Or is that just sort of a wish list that’s unachievable?
Gert: Absolutely. So we very often get clients coming in and say, Look, our SEO isn’t working. The first word that comes to my mind is segmenting. Let’s segment what is actually not working. Is it a certain article that’s not working? Is it a certain ranking you’re not getting? And then you have people selling iPhone cases and say they want to rank for iPhone. So whenever someone types in iPhone, the iPhone case site should be coming up. And this is something that probably in most cases, not even after five years of SEO work is going to happen. Because it’s just not even meeting that intention Google thinks that is behind people searching for iPhone.
Google is very big on search intent. So they want to make sure that they match the right search result with the right search intent: the reason why somebody executed a search in the first place. And this is where we help our clients pick their battles well, and say, Look, if you’re selling iPhone cases, you might be wanting to rank for iPhone cases in Sydney, or you might be wanting to rank for blue iPhone cases or something like this, or shockproof iPhone cases… We then do some research, keyword research, search portals like Reddit and Quora and see how people talk about this. What do people actually type into websites and search engines in order to find what you’re selling? And then try to position you for those things.
So when SEO doesn’t work, very often, it’s related to picking the wrong battles or trying to think that we need to target those high search volume, the 500,000 searches per month terms, where maybe a 200 searches per month term is actually the one that’s getting you your results.
James: Reminds me of this guy once when I used to do SEO. And he said, Well, if you can rank me on first page of Google, then I’ll let you speak at my event. So I went back the next day. And I said, you’re now number one on Google for your name. And your name book. And he goes, Oh. He said, No, I want to rank for online marketing. And I said, Well, two things there. One, it’s gonna take a fair while and a bit of budget. And secondly, I don’t know if that’s your ideal phrase. I mean, people who are actually looking for you might want to find you versus all the other sites that were there before they would find your own site. That’s one thing you do want to control. And he let me speak on his platform. But it’s a classic case of wrong target, and unrealistic expectations. So thanks for clearing that up for us, Gert.
Gert: My pleasure.
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