In Keywords Ain't All Dat: An SEO Lesson Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive showed that optimizing a page for "Google Analytics Consulting" got ranked well but drove no real traffic, even though there are 1,980,000 pages today in Google that contain the term "Google analytics consulting".

But here's the thing - the number of pages in Google for a keyword phase has nothing to do with the actual demand for that term.  Yet, you'd think the term "Google Analytics Consulting" would actually generate some traffic since Google Analytics is used so much AND there's clearly a  need for "Google Analytics Consultants", and in fact, there are some Google Channel Partners like Lunametrics and ROI Revolution who provide this.

But I have found a more likely measure of a term you'd want to optimize for is either a long term need that's somewhat niche (IE: Wine Expert or "Sommelier") or a Buzz Term that can generate a lot of traffic fast like "Iron Man Trailer", "Cloverfield Trailer", "1 8 08", "iphone review", etc (these are all terms I have optimized blog posts and got tons of traffic - literally a monsoon of traffic, as much as 500 visits an hour for as long as a week at a time…NON STOP).   And  yet, these terms did not, in most cases, have any more pages in Google than the "Google Analytics Consulting" term, and in some cases, even less pages.

It's not about the number of pages, its about DEMAND and TIMING - and that's something of a Sixth Sense with me - something I've developed but I don't even think I'd try to teach it or codify it.

Only to say this much, at least with Webmetricsguru.com - I can, pretty much, generate as much traffic as I'd ever need, just by following my intuition - because it, like the water dowsing stick - points me in the right direction of what to write about and how to write about it - while this blog, with it's fairly high PageRank and back link count - more or less, puts me striking range, if I pick right - of what ever target I set myself.

But that approach is not going to work if you don't have enough PageRank/backlinks and topical content - and that's the catch 22 here - it won't work unless your blog / site, is popular in the first place - and that's something you just have to work at - there are no real shortcuts.