PPC - Pay Per Click Management

As tools go for bloggers, there are not many that are as vital and important as a search engine management tool, from the likes of SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz. They provide a level of in-depth detail that is an absolute necessity if you want to truly create content, and a website, that skyrockets.

However, because of the level of data that these tools provide, not many people ever disagree or dispute the data they provide. In certain situations, this is exactly what you do. Here are the reasons why.

 

Low Search Volumes are Unreliable

Summarized by the Income School, when search volumes for keywords fall below roughly 200-300, the accuracy of such data falls too. Income school showed quite a discrepancy between what the SEM tools stated was the search volume, and what the articles actually got (those that ranked very high for such keywords).

For this reason, don’t assume keywords with low search volume in SEM tools get actually low search traffic. If anything, use some intuition and you could be gaining a good bit of traffic from these, with low levels of competition.

 

SEM Tools are Only Good for Evergreen Keyword Research

This is a really crucial point to remember that I recently discovered.

SEM tools all need data to display their information on keyword research volume, competition, and more. If the keyword is gaining traffic very quickly, there is not enough time for these tools to provide data on such a keyword. This means if you rely solely on such tools, you could be potentially missing out on big stories now, that could help your site go viral.

This recently happened to me on my site. I made an article that was in the news quite a lot and is now bringing in more than 10,000 pageviews a day. What more, the article is only ranking #5 for the main keyword. So, that keyword must be getting something like 500,000 search volume, but all SEM tools state it is less than 10…

The lesson to be learned? Stay up to date with the news and emerging stories and stay agile.

 

Site Audits not Strictly Accurate

SEM tools also like to give your site SEO audits, crawling the content, and telling you where you are going wrong.

As much as this is useful 90% of the time, it is not always accurate.

Typical errors I find in site audits include:

• Stating a 5xx error without there being any issue
• Stating a 4xx error without there being an issue
• Incorrect alt tags
• Duplicated content (where it is not)
• General SEO advice that is not always applicable, as I have in my cases

So, on the whole, it is worth doing the site audits. However, be cautious not to take everything as gospel truth – you’ll find every site audit you do will tell your website has a different ‘health’ due to such discrepancies and inaccuracies.