We had a client who was so enraptured with the full version of this chart that she handed it out to her CEO and her board. They had developed a list of 5 search terms which represented the KPIs for all search marketing. Problem was, the search terms were topics, not search phrases…so each one would have dozens of longer-tail search terms which had the core search term within it. That added a layer of complexity they weren’t happy with.

What they were ecstatic about was how optimizing on a lot of related search terms is exactly how you rank on the core term…so we exceeded all their KPI goals before we even finished optimizing the web site. We saw a 600% increase in search traffic over the second year, and launched a new site, targeted to the higher education market.