The Long-Tail is Your Best Bet for 1st Position
Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 2, 2008
Search engine optimization is now a very big and growing industry and there are thousands of people trying to rank for keywords that will impact their website to bring as much traffic as possible. If tomorrow you have a client that wants to you to optimize their website for the keyword DEBT CONSOLIDATION, (or if you have your own debt consolidation website), and you are not currently ranking, Good luck. You’re competing against 46,500,000 websites. That’s not to say its impossible but looking at the compeitition, doesnt seem like a task that will be very efficient.
Image taken from SEOBook.com
The long-tail has been talked about for a few years now as a very important element of ranking in the SERPs. You’ll be surprised how the long-tail can bring about good rankings and maybe (most likely) better conversion rates with a lot less compeition. Let’s keep going with the debt consolidation example.
If you or a client wants to rank for that keyword, it’s time to reconsider and strategize what keyword maybe worth the time and effort to optimize for. Let’s take for a example a debt consolidation company here in Miami. My advice, without doing any initial research off the top of my head would be to optimize for the keyword “Miami Debt Consolidation”.
Looking at Google, the keyword “Miami Debt Consolidation” has 210,000 results! I just took down the competition from over 46 million websites to 210,000. Now, we’re in business. We can still drill down a bit more to make sure we can achieve that #1 spot (considering there are searches for that keyword). Miami Debt Consolidation Company, etc.
Sure, there are millions of more people searching for the keyword “Debt Consolidation” but if you’re in Delaware and someone in delaware is searching for “Delaware Debt Consolidation” and stumbles on a website all about Delware Debt Consolidation, your conversion would be much higher. Less visits, more quality traffic.
[This post was written for readers who are new to search engine optimization and wish to understand the dynamics of ranking for keywords and how to go about strategizing the SEO keyword process]
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3 Responses to “The Long-Tail is Your Best Bet for 1st Position”
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
Tim Ramsey
By Tim Ramsey on Oct 2, 2008
Hi,
This is exactly what I recommend my clients to do also but there are few that really don’t understand. For example I had a client once that sells online perfumes for kids and he wanted to be number one for the word “perfume” or “kids” or “gift”. Finally I made him realize that those keywords not only that were irrelevant for his site but the competition was very high.
Great article and I’ll keep reading your blog (I also added this blog to my Blogroll)
Thank you
By Toma Bonciu on Oct 6, 2008
@ Tim: Thanks!
@ Toma: Thanks too! It is imperative that clients understand this and I think it’s simple to understand the dynamic of the importance of keyword relevance. I understand from a first glance to clients who dont understand much search marketing or seo it can be a bit confusing. I’ve had many people want to rank for very broad keywords but at the end of the day, you have to do whats cost effective and will be the best ROI strategy. Ranking for the keyword perfumes or kids when you have a website that sells kids perfumes wont yield much results at all, even if you did rank #1 in Google for the word perfumes. Your blog looks great too!
By Pablo Palatnik on Oct 6, 2008