I always enjoy the unique insights that Google Analytics gives regarding our website's effectiveness. Having worked briefly as a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) consultant, I remain geeky about how our site is doing in SEO terms (actually not super well to be honest; we are working on it). One of the most important and interesting pieces of information to me is which search engine keywords are directing traffic to our site. My goal is to be found when someone searches something like, "what is the best software outsourcing company in the world," or just simply "software development offshoring".
Well, today I got a new one. It turns out we actually have the number one google page rank for the search term "The Jordanian National Dish." Somebody searched this phrase and got their answer from our site. We're glad to help out.
So how did a software services and technology company get the top rank for a food related search? Well, it has to do with the important search engine optimization concept of Keyword Competition (number of sites with the same set of keywords) and Search Volume (how often these keywords are searched). Businesses like ours are all competing to be found in google using similar search terms. This competition uses a mix of SEO tools to boost google pagerank for certain terms. The more sites that are competing for the same keywords as you, the more difficult it is to get a high page rank. Because one of our developers used the phrase "The Jordanian National Dish" in his profile, that phrase was indexed by google. We are actually the only website to use that exact phrase.
So, while I would really prefer to be found when somebody searches "software outsourcing" on google, this is probably never going to happen. Google's handy keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) gives you a snapshot of search volume for a particular word. In the case of "software outsourcing," the monthly volume is about 90,500. That is a lot of searches. But nothing compared to just "software" with 226,000,000 searches per month.
The trick is to find niche keywords or phrases with low competition and high search volume. Tanasuk has succeeded in achieving the number one google page rank for "The Jordanian National Dish." The search volume for this however, is so low that it doesn't even show up in the keyword tool. Next on the list, "JAVA, PHP, and .Net Superstars".
And in case you were wondering, the Jordanian national dish is Mansaf, a mix of rice, lamb, and yoghurt.