SE Conspiracy

*Things change quickly, so for relevance, please note the date of this article.

I’ve been noticing around the Internet lately that top rankings only seem to pay off for extremely popular phrases such as “Credit Cards” and “Health Insurance.” I guess those phrases will be popular even within a small search engine. But, what about phrases like “Platinum Credit Cards” and “Health Insurance Quotes?” Do they actually generate worthwhile traffic?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

I was going to break this down by each of the three major search engines, but they all seem to have basically the same result. So, I’ll summarize them as a whole and pick out the slight differences. I’m searching for “Platinum Credit Cards” and I’m only counting what’s on the front page. It is not easy to rank well for this phrase, so you have to know you will be spending some money to get there.

Now, I’m seeing that there are mostly actual credit card companies as the bulk of the results -which is expected. All three major search engines have done a good job of weeding out the affiliate-only or ads-heavy sites and replaced them with actual, legitimate results (i.e. the companies themselves and only a couple of high-end referral directories).

The actual companies have high traffic -which is also expected, but there are a couple of sites in the results (across all three engines) that have little to no traffic at all. In fact, in MSN, the number #1 result (as of this posting) has absolutely no Alexa rank and probably fewer than 10 actual visitors per month!

One of the sites with very little traffic is in the top #10 across all three major search engines, and yet it has so little traffic. If that particular site earns enough in credit card referrals to cover the cost of its SEO campaign, I would be very surprised.

The remainder of the sites all have very high traffic -which we can now deduce did not come from the SE’s- and heavy advertising is the reason for their success.

So, is it better to spend your marketing dollars on SEO or on direct advertising?

Now, let’s check out the next phrase. I am now searching for “Health Insurance Quotes” and here’s what I found:

We have basically the same mixture as before with a good concentration of the actual insurance companies and only a small portion of directory or review sites. This is a major improvement over the results from 2005 and 2006.

On a side note: During 2005 and 2006, I was beginning to think there was a conspiracy whereby Google was sending traffic to only sites that couldn’t possibly make any money. But, since their results have improved drastically, I suppose I’ll put that conspiracy theory on the back-burner.

So, back to the results, I see the same thing as before. We have several sites that have high traffic but they are the actual companies who receive quite a bit of type-in traffic and they have high budget marketing campaigns. However, there are even more sites in these results -across all the major search engines- that are review sites, and all of them have pitiful traffic. Most of them are found in the top 10 across all three search engines, but they are either “decent traffic” or so little traffic it doesn’t matter. Since there is a site with no traffic at all but is at the top of two search engine results, I can only feel that the “decent traffic” sites must have more advertising besides just search engine optimization.

At any rate, I feel that we can conclude from these findings that the search engines do not really send that much traffic -even for quality terms- if you are not ranking for the most generic and high traffic terms. It’s either that or the sites with little to no traffic are being overlooked by searchers in lieu of more “recognizable” names.

Could it be that searchers have matured to the point that they are better judges of relevance on their own? Could it be that marketing and brand awareness is having an effect on which links a user clicks when they are searching?

You tell me.

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