Oh the hilarity of it all.
There is a lot of time and work that goes into running a successful travel blog, especially one that is the basis of your livelihood.
Writing posts, shooting and editing video, curating photos, sharing content, designing the site, tackling tecnical issues and perhaps the most challenging of all, SEO.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of making your site and content discoverable on Google. It’s a mind bending and constantly evolving process that personally, is not all that enjoyable.
There is however one aspect that I get quite a kick out of: search queries.
When you want to find something on the net, you might head over to Google or Yahoo, type in some relevant words and hope that the information you want will show up. Simple.
My goal, is to be one of the first results you see.
While their are a number of keywords I’d like to rank for, say for example travel blog or backpack, there are millions more that are irrelavant and are not my focus be it that I have a travel blog.
Every now and then, I get a good laugh when I see some of the searches people have done which have somehow, brought them to this very blog.
They bring joy to my SEO anxieties and today, it’s time I shared some of them with you.
“Whitney Houston/One Moment In Time/Grammy”
Perhaps this one should not be surprising but, it these collection of terms are some of the highest ranking terms for my blog in search engines.
When I posted my Tribute To Whitney Houston after death, I should expected that this would be a VERY popular topic and searched often. Though not the most relevant to a travel blog, the extra traffic isn’t unwelcome.
“Dead Body”
Ok, this one is strange. I have used this term only once in my Toronto Halloween but for some reason it gets some solid search traction. Apparently the term ‘Dead Body’ is searched for 675,000 a month…why? Glad I can have a piece of this creepy pie.
“Nudity In The Vatican”, “Vatican Nudity” & “Rome Nudity”
I would love to know why someone was even searching for these terms in the first place. HA!
Understandably they found my blog as I have a post with these terms in the title featuring my visit to the vatican with my mother and aunt where I ended up taking my shirt off so my mom could go inside.
“Haircutindia.com”
They found my Indian Hair Cut video but that’s not what they were looking for.
Go check out the site (haircutindia.com). So. Very. Random.
“Berlin Metro Puke”
Ummm… I have no clue. Why?
“Pumpkins and spending the evening going house to house with a pillow case, knocking on doors and collecting enough candy to last you at least a couple months.”
Once again, the searchie found my Toronto Halloween post and for the record, it’s called Halloween.
“Video Of Nudity In Denmark”
Yep, another nudity search and once again, they found my blog. In this case it was likely it was the terms Video & Denmark that found my Copenhagen Denmark Video post.
“Backpabackpackignwith brokl” (and variations)
There are a ton of ‘Backpack With Brock’ type searches everyone month but who ever made the above search must have been drunk, or asleep. All I know is they were in the UK.
It’s certainly the most colourful version of this specific search but they get points for actually finding my site with it.
And, I think we’re safe to wrap it up there.
The moral of the story is, people search for random things and oddly enough, sometimes end up on backpack with brock.
While my goal is to teach people how to travel the world, getting a loose searcher every now and then doesn’t hurt.
There are a lot more search queries that I have left out, but perhaps, I’ll make a part two down the road.
Did you search for any of these? What’s the weirdest search you have done?
If you have a website, what’s the funniest search term that has brought someone to your site?
