Clients generally like to rank highly for large, high traffic keywords. It makes sense, I mean wouldn’t it be great to rank #1 for the keyword “shoes”?
It turns out, that ranking for “shoes” will give you a significant amount of traffic, but the traffic won’t actually come from the word “shoes”.
In reality, it’s the keywords related to “shoes that will generate the traffic. In reality, these “popular” search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what’s called the “long tail” of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world’s demand for information through search engines.
So, here’s what will happen if out rank #1 in “shoes”. Sure, the traffic to your website from “shoes” will be substantial. However, the traffic from all the keywords related to “shoes” will be significantly higher then the traffic from “shoes”. The traffic from a ranking for “shoes” will generally be from the related keywords. If Google knows you’re the best site for “shoes”, then you’ll also generate traffic from “green shoes”, “best shoes”, “where are my shoes”, “pretty shoes”, etc. It’s the long tail keywords that drive the traffic.
The long tail Keywords are the ones that convert into sales
There’s another reason to focus on the long tail keywords. Long tail keywords often convert better. This higher conversion is because they catch people later in the buying/conversion cycle. A person searching for “shoes” is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other hand, someone searching for “best price on Air Jordan size 7″ is ready to buy!
Ranking for large keywords is very good. But, people often don’t realize that it’s not the ranking for the main keyword, but the other smaller keywords that generally pay the bills.
