This is the time of the year when every blogger in the world looks back at the year and creates a top 10 posts of the year blog post. Marketing Pilgrim published its top 10 list of 2009 and I was just as surprised as Andy Beal to discover that one of the items on the list was a post from 2007. How did that happen?
The post in question is this post on Google offering cheap online file storage. Let’s perform a little forensic SEO analysis:
- First, the post is No. 1 in Google for the key phrase “cheap online file storage”
- It’s also No. 1 in Bing and No. 7 in Yahoo!
- OK, let’s include Ask too. It’s No. 1.
That accounts for over 95% of all searches for that key phrase. How many searches is that, exactly? According to Google’s external keyword research tool, there are 46 searches per month for that exact key phrase. That’s not much, but consider that most searchers are going to clickon that top listing, 46 times 12 equals 552 additional visitors from a Google SERP. But that’s not a lot in comparison to Marketing Pilgrim’s overall traffic.
There are related keywords that could account for additional traffic. But let’s move on. Why does this post have such great search rank in the first place?
- The title of the post includes the key phrase
- There is one outgoing link that includes the phrase “online file storage”
- There is another outgoing link with the phrase “buy online file storage”
- Yahoo! reports 93 inbound links to that blog post (and a lot of them are from Techmeme, each one counting as a highly relevant and authoritative aged link
I don’t think you can point to any one factor as the reason for high rankings for this blog, but a combination of factors – the Techmeme links being big influences. And speaking of those, do you think that Techmeme could account for a high volume of traffic to this blog post for Marketing Pilgrim?
When it comes to ranking for keywords long term, it’s important to consider the important factors – relevance, authority, age, and long tail keywords.
This Marketing Pilgrim post ranks well for one keyword that is a long tail keyword, which means less competition. And that can sometimes make all the difference.
