Re-doing Keyword Research to Improve Traffic: Case Study 2

In my last post Why is my lens not getting traffic? The answer may be in the Keywords I used a Case Study to demonstrate how some keywords may not be working because either there’s not enough searches made each month and/or the competition may be too much. Today, we will look at another Squidoo Lens: The Best Sinus Infection Remedies for the Sinusitis Sufferer and see what we can do that may improve Lensrank and traffic.

At the time of checking the lens had received 41 visits in the past week and was sitting in Tier 3, ranked at 28,890 overall.

As I explained in my last post, whenever I see frustration being expressed at the lack of traffic, I always tend to think of keywords first. So, I headed off to the free Google Keyword Research Tool and checked out the keywords that Heather is using on her lens.

I looked at the URL, the lens title, the intro and the fact that the phrase sinus infection remedies is in bold in the intro.

Therefore, I came up with the following keywords that the lensmaster would appear to be targetting:

sinus infection remedies
best sinus infection remedies
sinusitis sufferer
sinus infection
effective sinus infection remedies

I added them to the keyword search box and you can see the results in the screenshot below.

Already you can see there could be a problem with three of the keywords – no searches for two of the phrases (including the one used in the URL) and only 480 for another. The others have high search volume, but also high competition – you will remember from my last post, that I add a calculation to my analysis that I call Ratio. This is the number of pages competing for that exact phrase, divided by the number of searches. The lower the ratio the better and many of my high traffic lenses have keywords with a ratio of less than 1.

This is where the Google Keyword Research Tool comes in very handy. Not only does it search for the keywords you specify, it will also list related keywords and, as I have said so many times, time checking out these keywords, is time worth investing, because it is here that you may find some keywords that may work well for your topic.

I downloaded the keywords already featured on the lens, plus some that I thought may work, into an Excel Spreadsheet and then started looking at the competition and this is what I found:

The keywords already in use are in red and there’s 12 keywords that may do better than sinus infection remedies, which is the best keyword already in use.

So, if it were my lens, what would I do?

We have to be realistic and some things are sometimes beyond fixing – the URL has a keyword that gets no traffic but it cannot be changed. Personally, I believe having a good keyword is essential in the URL, but others will disagree with me. But because the lens is established AND getting some traffic, then I would not worry about it – another lens could easily be made with a better keyword in the URL.

We have here a lens that does get some traffic, so we have to accept that anything we do on the page may kill off what traffic is already coming in. Therefore I would be very careful of deleting anything on the page, but there’s nothing to stop us from adding content and new modules.

To start with I would leave the lens title alone, at least for the time being, as the Lens is ranking in Tier 3, but I would change the Intro title to include Sinusitis Remedies which is a better keyword than sinus infection remedies.

Then I would go through the page, adding the new keyword phrases where relevant and if necessary add new modules with the better keywords in the headings.

One final point. I also looked at the lenses being featured on Heather’s lens in the right sidebar in the Discovery Module. Six related lenses, all about various aspects of Sinusitis and Nasal problems. None of them are hers!

So even if traffic is arriving on her page, it may be clicking out to these other lenses and they may be the ones making sales.

In the second screen shot you can see other suggested keywords and I will repeat the advice I often give and that is if you are making one lens on a topic, then make several. At least this way you can then include your own lenses in the Discovery Module.

Recently my best performing lens has been The Year of the Dragon. It is a very topical page, as we have just had Chinese New Year and an analysis of my lens stats shows that my Year of the Dragon page has benefitted hugely from visits from other related lenses – most of them mine about Dragons and Chinese Astrology.

Once Heather has made any changes, then she should look at establishing more backlinks to the page, as this will also help with traffic. She should make sure she varies the keywords she uses in the anchor text.

In a few weeks time, I will look again at this lens and the one I featured last time, to see what the lensmasters have changed and if it has worked.

Please note: Various factors contribute to getting traffic and in this article I discuss what I find generally works for me. There’s no cast iron guarantees that it will work for others.

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