The Long Tail And Why Your SEO Keyword Strategy Is Wrong
If youre doing SEO for your business or looking into it, chances are youre thinking a lot about which keywords you want to focus on. You probably have a pretty good idea which ones are the most important to you. You might even have a certain golden keyword youre looking at, thinking to yourself If I could rank #1 for that, it would change my entire business! Guess what? Youre wrong.
Ive heard all my life that the customer is always right, but not when it comes to SEO. Nevermind that most clients focus too much on rankings to begin with, rather than conversions or lead generation. Many, if not most of, the SEO clients out there are dead wrong when it comes to which keywords to focus on. We can learn how so many people got off track in the first place by taking in a quick history lesson about SEO and keyword strategy.
A Brief History of Keyword Strategy
In the beginning (of the Internet), there were three pillars the ideal keyword rested upon. The three qualities of keywords that were best to focus on were:
1. Relevance. Whats the use of your website ranking well for a keyword that isnt relevant to your business? Do you think someone searching for a product or service you dont sell is going to land on your website and think Interesting, I wasnt searching for this, but now that Im here, maybe I should look into this More likely theyll get a bad taste in their mouth about your company and quickly hit the back button.
2. Search volume. Why bother ranking for a keyword nobody searches for? The ideal keyword is searched for a lot.
3. Competitiveness. That is, you want a keyword with low competition. Do a quick Google search for whatever your most desired keyword is. If youre a law firm that needs more clients the term might be law firm or lawyer. After doing a search, youll see a line right below the Google search box and navigation that looks something like this:
About 276,000,000 results (0.63 seconds)
In the case of a search for lawyer thats the number Google gives me. For whatever you searched for, thats how many webpages youll be competing against if you want to optimize for that keyword. Making it into the top 3 search results, where the majority of search traffic goes, is easier to do when you only have 100,000 web pages to compete against rather than 100 million.
Based on this understanding, you might say I see, targeting the keyword law firm is too competitive, so perhaps since our firm only practices in Utah, we should optimize for utah law firm. If youre thinking along these lines, youre on the right trackto do SEO the old way, which is still the wrong way.
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The Long Tail And Why Your SEO Keyword Strategy Is Wrong