Site Ranking For Unusual Keywords? Here is why

Keywords are crucial because they connect what people are looking for with the content you’re giving to meet that demand. Your aim in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from search engine result pages (SERPs), and the keywords you choose to target (which includes including them in your content) will determine how successful you are. 

Regardless of how, there are instances where a website starts to rank high for keywords that are not related to the content or product of the website. In this scenario, some unusual set of keywords start to show up in their Search Console report.  

Google’s John Mueller also shared some information on Reddit in response to a thread titled: “My website has clicks from keywords that I can’t find on my site using them. How is this possible?” The concern constantly raised in the thread was the unusual keyword trends shown on website owners’ Search Console Reports. Unable to understand web owners are baffled as to why their website is coming up for such terms. What could be the cause of this?

“Usually that’s personalization & local targeting. Often you can guess if the queries are expected to have a large amount of impressions, and if your site is listed as being in the higher positions, but it just gets very few impressions. You also see this when you drill in by date and see that it’s just getting very few impressions sporadically (rather than regularly),” Mueller responded. 

If a site appears for unusual queries and the results can’t be simply replicated, personalisation and/or local targeting are the most likely causes. But there can be another reason for such unusual keyword responses i.e images. John Mueller states, it’s likely that photos from the site are being pushed into the one-boxes at the top of search results or the information panels on the side.