Purple Porcupine Pajama Pants? Oh, yes. They are the latest rage, do you have any? But, are they pajama pants for purple porcupines, or are they purple pajama pants for porcupines? Or, are they purple pajama pants with porcupines on them? No to all the above. Purple Porcupine Pajama Pants is a term that I will use in a discussion about ranking a web page on Google.
This post is primarily for the uninitiated, but even SEO veterans could possibly glean some insight. I arbitrarily chose “Purple Porcupine Pajama Pants” as a whimsical search term, a keyword phrase that should be super easy to rank for in Google. Hopefully, by the time you read this post, it will be in the #1 position.
Purple Porcupine Pajama Pants as a search term
My primary purpose for this post is to demonstrate that ranking #1 in Google, is of itself, potentially worthless. I have had clients that wanted to rank for particular keywords. It was an unbelievably difficult task to explain that their keywords were not a good choice. For example, the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) contains only 9 listings for my demo search phrase “Purple Porcupine Pajama Pants”. Often the number of pages returned for a competitive keyword will be in the millions. The term “cat food”, for example, returns 20,900,99 web pages relevant to the term. The number of sites returned from a search is not a direct indicator of how competitive a search term, but it does demonstrate it to a point.
Purple Porcupine Pajama Pants is Easy to Rank
This is a very obscure search term. No one is using to rank, and no one is using it in the search engines. It is easy to rank because there is no competition. There is no competition because there is no search volume. That is to say, no one is typing “purple porcupine pajama pants” into the Google search engine. When doing keyword research, it is important to balance low competition with high search volume. Ideally, the keyword will have a very high search volume, 300K per month, for example, with very low competition.
The point I am trying to make with this post is that low competition is only part of the equation. Search volume is easily as important than low competition. This post will shoot up to number 1. It is highly optimized, I will have it indexed by Google as fast as I can. I might even shoot it a couple of quick backlinks. The nine pages that I mentioned before will be easy to beat. To begin with, they are not especially relevant to the term “purple porcupine pajama pants”. Why in the world would they be? This post, on the other hand, is very relevant. In my next post, I will continue the discussion of ranking and keyword research.