Single Word Keywords — Don’t waste Your Time
Mar 5th, 2010 | By Gene A. Wright | Category: Feature, General, MarketingFrom WordTracker
The LongTail of Keyword Research –Single Keywords are for Losers
this article gives some excellent insight into Single Word Keywords. Time is precious, so is money. The evidence is in, keyword phrases in the “Long Tail” is the way to go.
Fromn the article “How do you make a profit from keywords that bring just one visit a month? Easy, you target lots of them at once – you target groups of keywords (keyword niches). Here’s how…
Let’s start simply with one page. Your SEO might focus on one or two keywords but you’re really targeting those keywords and their long tails. And the more relevant and related words on your page, the more of that tail you can get results for.”
READ the Bullet points in this article after the subsection called “How to make a profit in the Long Tail”
What did you think? Do you agree?
I wish I knew more about adding keywords to websites. It seems like it would be difficult to make a long tail while not just stocking up on keywords. I found it really interesting how many keywords those sites mentioned had and how many visits they get per key word. It makes you think that you have to work pretty hard to keep and gain customers. Interesting article but I wish I knew more! Hopefully I’ll continue to learn all about it this semester.
I agree with the long tail strategy. The biggest reason is, if you are new to search engine arena and you do not have lot of content or site is new, it is very hard to get precedence of your site over old SEO optimized sites and list along with them on first page of Google, even though you use the same head key words. So, as a late entrant the best strategy is to use long tail approach and it can work. The challenge is to do research and find the big list and include them in the article.
I like it. As a consumer searching for specific product choices on the internet, I often group words together to maximize my search productivity. But, sometime i like browsing and finding a bargain, like my wife at Boston Store. Unfortunately my reptilian brain says “buy” too often when my credit card information is handy.
Ok…now I get it. And I see how tagging and therefore, long tails work. But I think creating tags for this ridiculous amount of keywords would get heavy on both the back and front end. (Picture those blogs that tag each post with 5+ keywords…annoying!) Who’s job is it to keep track of this? If I’m picking up from the article, you don’t really do much when you having a winning keyword combination anyway. Is this really worth the effort?
I too, wonder if it is worth the effort. My thought, however, is that if I were to enter what my vendor may call a “long-tail keyword”, and land on their site – I’d probably be impressed that I was able to find exactly what I was looking for (or pretty close to). In turn, this would make me feel like the vendor knew what they were doing, I’d trust them more than others, and probably buy from them!
Given what I understand about user’s patterns and habits in searching, I think that this is a fairly accurate statement to make for people getting into SEO.
Most single keywords, and very important, branding, have been used for the general lexicon of single keywords. Heavyweights in their respective industries have probably monopolized those searches, and unless you are in the social strata to take them on, you are very well advised to focus on long-tail searches.
Plus, as people evolve (build a better mousetrap, the mouse evolves strategy), they will use more keywords to try and get the proper context of their searches. As an example, I know if I type in ‘cars’ into a search, I will get back numerous items on that query. If I use the query, ‘used car sales in Milwaukee’, I will save myself a tremendous amount of time in research.
I very much agree with the concept of the long tail applied to keywords. What I particularly like about using the long tail in thinking about SEO is how portable the idea is to different areas of interest, which makes it even easier to understand and apply it.
I say this because I first read about the long tail as it directly concerns the purchasing of entertainment, in this article: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html. As the author says ‘Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.’
This comment could be directly translated to SEO, as in ‘forget squeezing site hits from the most common search terms. The future of searching is in the millions of niche ideas explcitly expressed…’
It seems like small business have the opportunity to benefit greatly from taking the long tail approach to SEO, but also have limited resources to dedicated to long tail SEO optimization. Most SMB’s focuses on a niche market and can separate themselves from larger competing firms by marketing to their specific niche markets and the search term phrases they use. By applying the long tail SEO approach they can target their market more directly while increasing their visibility in the searches done with the long tail search phrases.
I would imagine that the conversion rate is much higher with long tail search results. People conducting these searches know what they are looking for and are probably ready to make a purchase versus the more generic searches conducted.
I am quite naive on the subject but it would seem to me a more detailed search (multi-word) would return what you are looking for. I am curious as to who connects these words to other words to make this long tail search functional.
The fact is that a search engine cannot figure out the meaning of a single word phrase. For instance if the word “potato” is typed in the search engine, there may be results for “french fries, potato famine, potato pancakes, etc”. A better approach would be a long-tail phrase such as “nutritional content of a sweet potato”. This long-tail approach is much more specific than a single word phrase. SEO is based upon the fact of connecting the consumer with the business.
Many products and services are detailed in their descriptions and uses. Long-tail keywords help one business separate themself from another. For instance a company may specialize in refinishing hardwood floors. Some keywords that may be beneficial to the company would be “antique maple floor stripper, resealing basketball court hardwood, and replacing broken or worn hardwood”. Instead of just using short keywords like “floors, wood floors, and fixing floors”. The more detailed the keyword search is that matches the listing for the specific webpage, the better conversion to a sale the prospect may be.
I have to wonder what the conversion rate is for people who follow long tail searches. If they are reached because they are highly contextual, then yes I agree with jeramie that the conversion rate would likely be much higher for those people. But I imagine many of those click throughs are people who ‘wandered’ onto the site through the shots in the dark.
It seems a little like the difference between SETI pointing recording devices towards the most likely candidates versus canvasing the entire sky for recognizable signals.
I definitely agree that this is an area that cannot be ignored, especially for smaller players who can’t hope to compete directly against the large players, but I don’t think you can simply ignore the more typical keywords. However, in the bullet points at the end of the article, it does make the good point of not worrying about the individual keywords since those will sift out simply through the content of the page itself.
I like the idea, but the article leaves me a little too much with a feeling of a “How to beat the odds in Vegas!” tutorial.
After reading this article I got a much better idea on how using long tail keywords can be more profitable to your website. The main point to understand is that is is much more difficult to optimize your website with long tail keywords, it takes a lot of research to know which niche long tail keywords are optimal to your consumers. When I shop on the web, I am very specific about search terms I use, to be able to get results that are most relevant to what I am looking for. With that being said, there are probably products i would prefer to purchase, but dont because they are not a result for me to consider. I also think that internet shoppers are becoming more search savvy and learning how to use multiple keywords to search for products, so it is valuable to spend the time researching what keywords your customers are using to obtain larger ROI and profits overtime. Using basic short keywords are just not what is going to get your website releavnt to search results, and will never come up as an option.
I absolutely agree based on my personal experiences. A basic 1-2 word search doesn’t seem to do the trick anymore these days as the web continues to expand exponentially.
As a website owner, I experience significant traffic from 1-2 word searchers. HOWEVER, those searchers usually only stumble on the site by accident. By using 1 keyword, they aren’t able to find specifically what they want, and therefore they don’t stay long on the website. However, by optimizing for long tail searches, in my experience those visitors spend more time at my website and click through more links. I definitely agree that long tail search is the way to go…
It reminds me of the old search engine “Ask Jeeves?” where it was commonplace to use longtail searches.