SEO isn’t just about getting visitors to your website; it’s about getting the right visitors to your website, visitors who will ultimately convert into customers. Search engine optimization isn’t just about getting traffic; it’s about converting traffic, bottom line.
Keyword research is the starting point of most seo campaigns. Millions of times a day searchers enter keywords and keyword phrases into the search engine search boxes. They’re searching for things you know about; things your website, or your client’s websites, are centered around. Topics like:
* Low income mortgage information
* Creamed cucumbers recipe
* How to relieve lower back pain
* Etc…
People come to the Internet to find information about specific topics, like those above. The keyword cars may have a search volume of 6 million, but the chance that the searcher who typed it in will find exactly what they’re looking for, is slim to nil. And if you want to rank for the search term cars, you’ll need to hire seomoz, and pay them a gazillion dollars; because that’s the only way you’ll get it.
The reason the searcher probably won’t find exactly what they want, is because right now Google is returning 822,000,000 results for the search term cars. That’s a lot of websites for the searcher to weed through. This is where researching and optimizing for the long tail search becomes necessary.
Cars is a root word. When we start adding to it and making it a two, three, four… word phrase we begin to discover the “long tail” of cars or the long tail keywords:
* Cheap cars
* Cheap Italian cars
* Purple vw bug cars
* Used cars San Francisco California
* Hybrid cars
* Where to buy a hybrid car
* You see where I’m going with this?
This is the information searchers are looking for, they want specifics. Deliver specifics. The way to bring targeted traffic to your website is to optimize for the long tail search terms. These are the terms that have the best chance of accomplishing your bottom line, of attracting the searcher who wants exactly what you offer.
As the tail gets longer, the search volume decreases, but the ability to list for the keyword phrase increases. What else increases? The probability of converting your site visitor into as paying customer.
