How Important is Keyword Research?

Hey there WAers,

Just a quick one today but I wanted to just jump in and show you the results of one of my sites. This one is to do with travel meaning it is in a high competition area and has taken a little while longer than other sites I have had to get traction.

I am also using it to experiment with AI interlaced with my own travel experience which is interesting - especially if I hope to get around Google's 'scraping' policies for getting ads on it in future - but that is a subject for another day.

How has the site been going?

Well, I am glad you asked - and the answer in a nutshell is "rocks and diamonds". And in the interests of keeping you all awake, I will run with the highlights:

1. Paul starts website and adds content like mad (around 10 - 15 posts a week) covering tips, buying guides, reviews and so on.
2. Site starts to generate traffic - happy days
3. Google decides to bring out it's new EEAT algorithm - traffic returns to ZERO
4. Paul undertakes a process of "user friendlyizing" old posts and adding new posts.
5. Site starts to generate traffic again - happy days
6. Paul goes to Bali for two weeks and site traffic returns to ZERO.
7. Paul ads new posts at an alarming rate and works on site speed and EEAT requitements. He also gets annoyed at Google and starts running facebook pages as well.
8. Site starts to generate traffic again - happy days
9. Paul goes to the U.S. with his family for Xmas and site traffic returns to ZERO.
10. And it all starts again

Now, I will do another post on why the site lost traffic whilst I was away but for the moment, you get the picture of the roller coaster that has been my emotions... oops, I meant my website.

So how do keywords help?

Another great question. Well, as I embark on my 4th iteration of rebuilding traffic, which is a mixture of more posts and trawling Google Search Console to re-rank old posts, I noticed something quite interesting:

All of my ranking posts are for low hanging fruit keywords:

Note: In AHREFS, the lower the number the less competition there is for that keyword.

And as you can see, all of my posts that are ranking whilst I rebuild my site are for the low hanging fruit keywords :i.e., decent traffic and low competition.

So, what does all this mean?

And yes, I could have just written this and nothing else, but for those of you out there either starting a new site, or trying to increase traffic to an old one, try and add posts with good low hanging fruit keywords first.

In my experience, this gives your site the best chance of getting rankings quickly.

Thoughts?

Paul