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Why You Are Chasing The Wrong Kind of Keywords

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This was yesterday’s newsletter topic. I thought it was worth sharing. If you aren’t subscribed, click here to get on the list for next week.

Today I want to talk about keywords. I want to talk about the way keywords relate to your prospect and how to reflect it in your content and blog posts. Every day I talk to someone who wants to rank for “kitchen remodeling” or “bathroom remodeling.” I spend the next 20 minutes explaining that it is A., almost impossible, and B., why you don’t want to anyway.

Here’s the short answer to why it’s almost impossible

You have too many competitors who have been around much longer than you who, while their sites may not be as good as yours, get higher trust from Google. There is only two ways around that one…use PPC to place higher, or spend the next X number of years trying to beat them with SEO. Both are expensive and time consuming.

Here’s why you don’t want to anyway

When someone types the phrase “kitchen remodeling” into the search bar, you have no idea what the user intent is. Sure, you THINK they want to know about kitchen remodeling, but you don’t know for sure.

The solution? Chase long-tail keywords instead

Long-tail keyword use is a great tool for writing blog content, but you can adapt it to your main website content too.

What are long-tail keywords?

Let’s start with the definition, from Wikipedia:

The term long tail has gained popularity in recent years as describing a retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.

The long tail Chris Anderson popularized there term in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, where he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this state elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

How the long tail relates to keywords for you

In keeping things simple, I will use an example of a search right in my own backyard. Instead of searching for “kitchen remodeling,” I use the auto-populate feature in Google to longer or ‘long-tail’ options like:

Kitchen remodeling contractor South Jersey
Kitchen remodeling contractor Spokane
Kitchen remodeling ideas
kitchen remodeling costs

These are fantastic 3, 4 and even 5 word keywords that you would use for long-tail content development. These are the types of keywords you SHOULD be targeting, and the types of keywords we target in our blogging campaigns for clients, because they do three things:

  1. They get you closer to an actual buyer
  2. While they may be searched for less, we know the user intent is on potentially doing the service searched for, not just learning about it.
  3. Gives you a higher conversion ratio

So my Sunday suggestion would be to stop chasing the same keywords everyone else is and start digging deep. A 4-word keyword could mean a significant amount of new business if done right. If you need help getting at keywords the rest of your competitors don’t know about, let me know, maybe we can help!

Have a great week!

-Darren