Father’s Day Gift: SEO Case Study

Looking for that perfect Father’s Day Gift?

You’re not exactly in the right place.

In fact, if you used Google to get here, looking for a gift, we’re pretty surprised because you passed by some good places to shop in order to find us.

That’s not to say this article won’t be useful in your pursuit. If nothing else, you’ll at least start to figure out why the sites you see at the top of Google are, well, at the top of Google.

Let’s start from the top.

A Trending Search

This morning, as we do every morning, we popped into Google Trends to check out what people are searching for. Given that this Sunday, June 19, we weren’t surprised to see fathers day gifts in the top 10.

This tells us that a lot of people are browsing to Google and searching for phrases that contain the words “fathers”, “day” and “gift”.

Google Trends will show you some other stuff like sample results from news outlets, blogs and the web at large. It also shows a small graph showing how the search volume is trending.

That’s all well and good, but let’s cut to the chase.

Who’s reaping the benefits from this trending in Google?

Gifts.com

To find out, we just searched for fathers day gift.

A bit to our surprise, Gifts.com came up #1.

In fact, Gifts.com owns the top three spots for the search term, all ranked above news results and Amazon, which we would have guessed owned the top spot. That’s pretty impressive.

How hard was it for them to get there?

What it Took to Get There

To find that out, we fired up Market Samurai and ran a keyword analysis on “fathers day gift.”

Market Samurai tells us we’re facing an uphill battle if we want to rank for this term.

• SEOC – 31,400,000: That’s the number of web pages around the globe that mention these three words
• SEOTC – 335,000: That’s the number of web pages around the globe that mention these three words in the title of the web page
• SEOTCR – 504,000: That’s the number of web pages around the globe that mention these three words in that exact order in the URL of the web page

We can further get an idea of how strong Gifts is by looking at that specific URL in Market Samurai. And this is where it gets scary.

A lot of the information in the image is self-explanatory, but a few things stick out.

• Domain Age – 13: The domain is 13 years old. That’s pretty freaking ancient and a really strong booster.
• Backlinks – 326: Market Samurai tells us that there are 326 external pages linking to this domain. That’s quite a few.

If we’re looking for a silver lining, we can take note that the page’s title and headers do not contain the key phrase.

But what if we didn’t have Market Samurai? We can still get a good look at this information using a combination of tools.

Manual Research

First, we can get some basic data using Google’s Keyword Tool.

If we fire that up, we can see that about 27,000 people globally and 18,000 people State-side search for “fathers day gift” each month. Given that it’s an average of months, this isn’t very helpful for right now. We’d imagine that the volume is 10-12x in the month of June than any other month.

Also, Google gives us an idea of how hard it would be to rank for that term with its little competition bar. A fully green bar means heavy competition. A mid-green bar is medium competition and a non-green bar is low competition.

Again, surprisingly, Google ranks “fathers day gift” as medium competition.

Finally, from the Keyword Tool, we can click on Google Insights to get a page that breaks down the searches by region, time and more.

Playing around with the option, we produced a couple charts:

The only thing, perhaps, shocking out of all of this is that New Jersey leads the way in search volume.

Site Explorers

Next, we need to check how many links are pointing back to that page. For that, we turn to Yahoo! Site Explorer and SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer.

When we look at Yahoo, we get a different, and less scary number of backlinks: 49. And when we look at SEOmoz, we see a total of 77.

When we have such wildly different numbers, we’re likely to take the average.

SEOmoz provides us with even more useful information and provides the Page Authority and the Domain Authority of the linking pages as well as the landing page.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much solace there, either, if we’re hoping to knock off Gifts.com.

The top linking sites have top-level domain authorities and mid-to-high-level page authorities. And the landing page itself scores well on both of these, too.

Not a Chance in Hell

So, our here is what our case study tells us: We’re not going to knock off Gifts.com on this term without a huge budget and a lot of time.

Alternatively, what we would do is find closely related, but less strongly held phrases like “last minute fathers day gift” or “fathers day gift baseball game” or something like that.

We hoped you found this useful. If you didn’t, comment and we’ll put you to work.