SEO Industry Moving to Long-tail Keywords
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important ways of getting visitors and thus (potential) customers to your corporate as we explained before.
Miles Cottrell from UK-based SEO company, Top Click Media, puts it this way in an interesting press release: “Keyword choice is the corner stone of any good SEO campaign, get this wrong and it doesn’t matter how skilled your team, how hard you work, you will not be getting the best out of your campaign.”
Cottrell says that traditionally the SEO industry has been dominated by fierce competition between companies vying to be number one for the high profile keywords within their industries. As Miles states, “The logic has traditionally been that if you sell showers it’s best to be number one for keywords like ‘showers’ or maybe slightly modified ones like ‘luxury showers’, ‘power showers’.” But things seem to be changing…
Miles claims: “anecdotally, professionals within the industry are talking more and more about the practice of bypassing the ever increasing competition for the major generic keywords by focusing on longer search phrases, or long-tail keywords.”
Cottrell’s company is one of the UK’s proponents of this new way of thinking. Below he explains why (and we took it literally from the press release because, well, for once there is not much to add!).
The Buying Process
“All customers go through what’s known as a buying process before they make a purchase. This is particularly pronounced with bigger purchases though it happens with practically everything. The first part of the process is the research phase or ‘browse phase’ where the customer is researching the available products prior to making a decision. Once the customer has made a decision they move into the buy phase, at this point they know what they want and are looking to buy during that internet session. They are now only thinking about where to buy from as opposed to what to buy.
This is relevant to SEO as people who are researching don’t yet know what they want and so are very generic with their searches. People in the buy phase have done their research and know exactly what they want. Their searches are therefore more specific and therefore longer, rather than searching for a ‘DVD player’ they are going to search for a ‘Toshiba DVD player’, or even ‘Toshiba SD290EKB DVD Player’.
Someone in the buy phase is much more useful to have on your site than someone who isn’t, so it seems logical to target them with these longer keywords.”
Ease of Optimization
“The downside of long-tail keywords is that the search volumes are much lower than those of the more generic keywords. However, you are often able to make up for this by having more of them because long-tail keywords are so much easier to optimize for. This is purely down to the fact that fewer people are attempting to optimize for them, so the competition in many cases simply isn’t there. Whereas ‘DVD player’ might take a year or two to rank well for, ranking for a more specific term could be done much quicker.” Read more about this at Top Clicks Media
Tags:content,design,google,keywords,optimization,search engine,sem,seo
