Most people carry out keyword research fairly mechanically and look at just two areas in particular: Popularity, and competition.
Over the years this has become such a culture with SEO enthusiasts that very often they fail to realize that there are other factors at stake too. These factors can not only affect how likely your website is to rank for that keyword – but they can also in some cases actually affect the amount of traffic you gain.
In short, even if you get in the top 10 of an immensely popular keyword you could find that you’re only getting a handful of actual visits from it.
One very new factor that you need to think about in that regard is: How crowded the search results page is.
Additional Listings Crowd Results
Once upon a time, search engine results were simply listed with about 20 on each page meaning that 10 were ‘above the fold’ and visible the minute the results loaded without needing to scroll down.
As time has passed however, search engines have added new listings to their search engine results and these new components have pushed the actual organic results lower and lower down the page.
For example: Google now displays results that include sponsored links (i.e. paid results), local results, image results, video results, real-time results (from Twitter), and news results for certain searches. Although the order of those results differs – that still amounts to a large number of extra listings.
Can you imagine just how far down the page that could potentially push your listing, even if you are in the top 10?
In some cases, it means that even if you’re in the top 5 your result ends up being shown ‘below the fold’. Naturally, that will represent a huge loss of traffic, especially if you’ve been counting on that particular keyword to supply the bulk of your regular visitors.
All said and done – you need to take ‘crowding’ into account.
Gauging Page Crowding on Search Results
The good news is that it is easy enough to see for yourself how crowded a search results page is – just go to Google and type in the keyword. Be sure that any personalized settings that you may have are off however, so that the results you see will be the same as what others do.
As you’ll find, it is mostly those extremely popular, one-word keywords that end up attracting numerous sponsored results, real time listings, local listings, and so on. Most of the long tail keywords rarely have crowded results pages.
Check the keywords you intend to target for yourself. Also, you should be aware that the addition of these ‘new’ listings might provide an opportunity for you to get your website listed there as opposed to the regular organic search results.
So as much as this might be a little bit of extra hassle – it could also be something you can turn to your advantage.
Who knows, you might even be able to pull in more traffic in the long run!