Of course site owners want to drive as much traffic as possible to their website. The logic is simple—the more visitors to a site the more business that site makes, right? Interestingly enough, it’s not that black and white. While having thousands of visitors to your site each month is great, isn’t having thousands of highly qualified, well-targeted visitors better? I’ve spoken with many site owners that have a list of keywords they want to rank well for and they often refuse to deviate from that list. I hear the same argument time and time again during the SEO keyword research phase of optimization, “Why would I want to target a keyword that only has 300 searches a month when this keyword gets 3,000?” Here is why:
First and foremost, just because a keyword gets 3,000 searches a month and you target it, that doesn’t mean that all 3,000 of those visitors are going to click through to you site. The more search volume a keyword has the greater the competition is, meaning searchers are going to have a lot more options. “Insurance,” for instance, gets 24,900,000 searches each month. No single website is going to get all 24,900,000 visits. Big name brands like Allstate and Nationwide are going to dominant the search results pages because they have the time, money and manpower needed to actually carve out a position for themselves for such a broad keyword. A local insurance agency isn’t going to be able to compete with that and will find themselves pushed to the depths of the SERP for such a broad keyword. So what if people search for “insurance” 24,9000,000 times a month? Chances are they are never going to see your website.
Secondly, just because a keyword has a low-search volume, that doesn’t mean it can’t positively impact your visitor growth in time. Let’s say that local insurance company decided to add “small business insurance broker” to their list of targeted keywords. “Small business insurance broker” only gets 320 searches a month, a paltry sum when compared to 24,900,000. However, even if that insurance company was only able to pull 50 of those searchers to their website every month by targeting “small business insurance broker,” by the end of the year they will have delivered 600 new visitors to their website. If they targeted another 10 long-tail keywords that each drew another 50 visitors every month, that’s an additional 6,000 visitors in one year! For some websites, a 6,000 visitor uptick can be a major improvement. Those low search volume keywords can add up over time and make a huge impact on your website.
Finally, although long-tail keywords might not drive thousands of visitors to your site, they are driving highly qualified and well-targeted visitors. Searchers that rely on broad keywords are typically at the very beginning on the buying cycle and are just looking for information. They may bounce from site to site trying to learn about a particular product/service and what each vendor has to offer. Searchers that use long-tail keywords to find a website typically are further along in their buying cycle and are looking to convert. They’ve done all the research to make an informed decision and they are ready to act. Imagine what your website could do with 50 qualified leads each month that came through one of your new, long-tail keywords! In a kind of roundabout way, targeting long-tail keywords is a form of qualifying leads.
So why are you sticking to your list of 10 keywords? I’m not saying you should completely forgo broad keywords, especially ones that are important to be an industry leader, but augment them with additional long-tail keywords! This will help drive more traffic to your website, carve out a unique niche for your brand and help improve your conversion rate over time.