Why would anyone say that about their company?
Well, for one, because we truly didn’t earn it. For two, it’s fun to play Monday morning quarterback and criticize Google’s brilliant algorithms (that keeps me employed).
Prudent or not, let’s get into it.
This article, “What does a content marketing consultant do & how do I hire the right one,” generates 22,000 impressions and 352 clicks every quarter. The majority of those impressions are coming from the queries content marketing consultant and content marketing consulting.
We rank No. 1 in SERPs for both of those keywords.
If nothing about this strikes you as odd, let’s back up and talk semantic search. The objective of semantic search and the Google Hummingbird update was to deliver results based on intent. These can loosely be bucketed into navigational, informational, and transactional intentions.
Now consider the phrases content marketing consultant and content marketing consulting. I would argue that these are commercial-oriented, transactional types of queries. I would also argue that these terms are qualified, high-value keywords.
Go back and read that article – you will quickly realize that the content is absolutely not commercially oriented. If you wanted to learn more about hiring a content marketing consultant, this page is not for you.
Don’t believe me? The data does. Check out how it looks in SERPs:
Notice how companies are actually PAYING for this keyword? As a matter of fact, people are paying roughly $7.50 per click to put themselves ahead of our fairly irrelevant article.
For the sake of being thorough, let’s look at engagement to determine if visitors are enticed to click on the link, and what they do afterward.
A 1.66 percent CTR for a first position ranking? Unheard of. What about the people that do actually stumble on this article?
A nearly 83 percent bounce rate. Pretty damning.
Let’s go back over the facts of the case:
- We rank No. 1 for two keywords that have commercial intent.
- People pay for those keywords.
- There is an abnormally low CTR for a No. 1 ranking keyword.
- The blog post has an extremely high bounce rate.
- We score no conversions.
I would say this case is closed. We don’t deserve to rank for this keyword. Google made a mistake, and we are already working to repurpose this page so we can generate some conversions.
Do you have content worth repurposing? We can help with that:
