Monday, November 21, 2005

Funny Cartoons - the ups and downs of Google rankings.

Myself and Bif made a decision some time ago to aim for a good Google ranking on the niche term 'Funny Cartoons'.

This decision was fuelled by several factors.

• We aimed for Google, rather than 'search engines' as Google has the lions share of search traffic.
• We went for a niche term (more targeted, less searched keyword phrases) to improve our chances of a higher ranking.
• We chose Funny Cartoons as our niche term as our research showed it to be the optimal niche key phrase for our market.

Overall, it has been a fruitful decision. We are on page 1 for a Google search of Funny Cartoons.

Our stats for last month show that 27% of the searches that brought visitors to BifSniff.com were searches for 'Funny Cartoons'. Plus a further 4.1% for 'Funny Cartoon' - which in terms of actual visitors is 1327. Not too shabby. Mind you, if you want to REALLy put things in context, check out the stats for BoingBoing.

Over the last few months we have been bouncing around quite a bit. In last month or two we were seeing a steady climb up the Google rankings, but today I notice we seem to be slipping down a bit again. It's a tricky business, and a competitive world this findability lark!

Of course, we will get to no.1 for a Google search for 'Funny Cartoons' - because we're brilliant. But it might take some time yet.

Also, long term plan would be to get a good result for a Google search of 'Cartoons' but that's a REALLY competitive arena and one we're just not ready for yet.

I post all this in the hopes that it proves useful to other cartoonists or webcomic peoples who are getting into web publishing and may need to give some thought to findability and search terms - I wanted to share with you two things:

1. It's entirely possible to get traffic to your site by optmising your site for niche terms
2. It's hard work! Don't give up. Keep at it. We've been working with 'Funny Cartoons' for over 9 months - does this mean our baby is due?!

I hope to get a chance to write up some tips on how to optimise your site for niche key phrases soon... I'll keep you posted!

UPDATE

We just fell off page 1 for funny cartoons, but we now appear at result 104 for 'cartoons' which we previously didn't rate for at all! So good news and bad news there I guess!