I love checking my server stats. It always turns up a ton of great information. Sure, I can see how much traffic I’ve received, where my users are in the world and, more importantly, how they reached my site — and all of that information is hugely valuable.
But mixed into all that data is often a bunch of details that just have me scratching my head.
Like the search terms that have brought people onto my pages.
Some of the terms I see listed on my stats have absolutely nothing to do with the content of my Web pages. I actually have to go to those pages and look through the content to find out how a search for that term brought that user to my site. Often, it will be a sentence that I tossed in as an aside and which caught the robot’s eye.
After all the effort we put in to climbing the search engines for our chosen keywords, it’s funny to discover that we can have good rankings for terms that we would never have even considered.
So what can you do with that information? If you discover, for example, that your site about cars is getting hits from people looking for information about “sinks,” how can you turn those clicks into cash.
The first problem is figuring out whether you should even bother to try. If you’re only getting one or two visitors a month looking for that search term, then it might not be worth the effort of turning a high ranking for an obscure search term into income. But if the search term looks popular and if you’re getting a steady stream of users clicking through, then it might be worth playing around and seeing if you can do something about it.
For example, you could create a stand-alone page with an article just on that topic. You wouldn’t need to update it but you would need to make sure the ads are visible, effective and high-paying. Even if it only gives you a few extra dollars a week, that’s a couple of free lattes your luck has brought you.
What you certainly want to do though is make sure that that search term isn’t throwing your contextualized ads. If your car site is getting ads for sinks and bathroom equipment because the robot has picked up on the wrong keywords, it’s going to cost you more than a few cups of coffee.
You might be able to pick a few extra bucks with a lucky keyword, but you definitely don’t want to lose any.