In the realm of SEO, it’s easy to think - “Let’s follow what is trending now” or “Everyone is talking about this topic, so why not target this keyword.”

In most cases, you may experience an increase in traffic; but then, there are likely no changes in your conversion rate. That was what happened with Base For Music, our client, and a start-up music promotion service.

How Does The Trap Work?

The trap worked wonders into feeding you 'FOMO', fear of missing out, in which our client was no exception. For the last 12 months, NFT has been a trendy topic with search volumes from 1M to 10M in countries like the United States, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom. 

Considering the popularity of the topic, the client's internal team decided to push out an article targeting NFT music keywords, 'How to sell your music as NFTs.'

For a year after the NFT article's publication, the keyword brought 8,310 sessions to the website which became the second source of traffic besides branded keywords. Beyond the traffic it generated, the audit we ran through Google Analytics revealed no impact on the revenue.

NFT keywords only had 4 transactions over that whole period - indicating a 0.04% conversion rate. This imposed a major issue for SEO which is unqualified traffic/leads coming to the website. At the end of the day, it translates into wasted SEO effort and opportunities for real conversions to happen - impacting the business' profitability.

Why Does Relevancy Matter?

The case study of NFT keywords brought us back to the basics which is the user's intention when searching for keywords. When seeing keywords with hundreds of thousands to millions of search volumes with good trend signals, it's tempting to jump into it and forget whether the user's intention is relevant to our product/service or not. 

For the case of NFT, the article talks about selling music as NFTs which indicates the user intends to sell music to earn money. Users looking for NFT articles online search intent is to sell their music. On the contrary, Base for Music targets users who are searching for advertising their projects. Therefore, there is a discrepancy between offer (advertising) and demand (NFT selling).

If our client were an NFT platform for selling music, it makes sense to go for the keyword 'sell NFT music.' Though generating traffic, the priority should be on first targeting the most service-relevant audience. 

What Will Be The Best? Relevant And Trendy Subject! 

The reason why this article focused on the idea of a 'trap' instead of straight up telling you not to go for trendy keywords is that we do believe there's a right way to use trendy keywords. A relevant and trendy keyword can be a major boost to your SEO strategy. 

However, it takes time and effort to pinpoint what keywords are relevant and trendy to your product/service. So there's one question we always ask ourselves, "Is this keyword something I want to be known for?" Once you find a trendy keyword that can answer it, you have found your ideal keywords to target and dominate.  

With that perspective, we shifted the SEO strategy to keywords that both drive traffic and carry relevance toward our client's service. After keyword research, we decided to target the 'Spotify Ads' keyword, a relatively trendy topic with a 10K-100K search volume in the United States, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom. 

When comparing the conversate rate, Spotify Ads keywords generated 48 transactions in the same period when we evaluated NFT keywords - translating into 1.78% of the conversion rate. Although Spotify Ads keywords didn't bring a major kick to the website's traffic, it offered relevant traffic which led to conversions. 

The keyword eventually became the main revenue generator for our blog section. The simple reason behind this is that although it's a trendy subject, our client does offer Spotify Ads as their product. Hence, it was a win-win situation for SEO and the client. 

From the case study, relevancy is the key to escaping the trendy keyword trap. There's no point in having your SEO effort only generate an abundance of traffic. What we all want to focus on as marketers is relevant traffic coming from relevant keywords - leading to conversions. Opt in for our slack channel to get the first access to an extensive guide for keyword research.