Entertaining Search Stories
Last night I was checking out the site stats for iThnk.com. I went through the keywords that were searched for on Google resulting in a click for our site, an exercise I found to be quite entertaining.
The most prolific search term for getting clicks is “balance”. True story. In fact, it is more than double that of any other term used to find us. I’m not even going to start to speculate what the searchers were looking for when they chucked this into the Google machine, but I doubt they always got what they wanted by finding us. There have been plenty of relevant search terms that relate to what we write about on here which is encouraging. Stuff like:
- “how to write a blog”
- “cool facebook brands”
- “fbml resources and guides”
Then of course there the some that are totally obscure or just plain funny. Already today we’ve had a couple of stunners: “whale” and “work from hell” (is that the next step when working from home doesn’t work out?).
My favourite of them all though….
“Social media makes you lame”. Three times did people search for this phrase on Google, and then had the audacity to click on iThnk! Ok so it was somewhat related to this post; but seriously, what were they really hoping to discover – a cure for their lack of personality? In saying that, I would like to think reading our blog will help make you not quite so lame. OR were they looking to find some evidence to back-up such a controversial claim from a reputable social media resource? We certainly are reputable (don’t laugh!), although I’m not so sure our posts suggest SM turns you into some kind of outcast. Oh well, traffic is traffic I guess. There are screeds of classic examples of search terms gone wrong online - these made me laugh. Or check this post out for some of the funniest Google searches.
I’m not too keen to add to the seemingly endless amount of SEO tips that are available, this was more a light-hearted look at how people are finding iThnk.com. What I will say though is that if you are going to invest energy (and resources) into optimising the keywords on your site or blog, be wary of offering false promises. If you want people to find you by searching “Facebook page tips”, make sure you have this info available. If you’re actually trying to sell car insurance then don’t expect your visitors to stick around very long.
Do You Have Any Entertaining Search Stories?
I’m interested to hear any other outrageous search terms that you have come across so please share your stories below.
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This post was written by Andy Moore (aka @MooreOfAndy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin. |