Google Love And The Long Tail
By Raül Rosales, Operations Manager at FXstreet.com

In the business we usually obsess about the keywords that drive more visitors to our sites. But sometimes the usual top ten suspects aren’t really that important.

If you want to look into your best keywords, the first thing you have to do is remove all the “navigational search”. For instance, people searching in Google for “forex street” are not going to be new to our site (or if they’re new, they knew about us somewhere else, maybe someone just told them), hence the “navigational search” term. You don’t want to count that people when digging into keywords because they’re not discovering you using that search. For us, navigational search is approximately 26% of the traffic coming from search engines.

Our top 3 navigational search keywords: fxstreet, fxstreet.com, fx street.

Even when you look at the other 74%, you’re also usually tempted to focus in the top ten, that’s justified when those ten searches mean a lot to you.

For us, the top ten keywords generate just 13% of the traffic (for the top 50 that’d be only 20% approximately). So we don’t have that super good keyword that gives us a lot of traffic (I’m looking at you Forex.com). But we’re happy to think that we’re not so Google-dependent that way.

Anyway we’re not overly obsessed with optimization, but we check the list quite often and sometimes we get good ideas.