Content, content, content is the mantra. Then many gurus continue to advocate ‘going for the long-tail keywords’ – it’s easy to get top rankings for these keywords. Tosh – more on this later.
Long term keywords
Let’s say you’re trying to create a page on your website that targets the “Directory” keyword. Hey, that’s a highly competitive keyword with 977,000,000 competing pages. However, if you design a page that targets the “master UK business directory submission list”, the competition narrows down to just 240,000 pages. So the gurus will say it’s easier to rank higher on that phrase: true, but is it worth it?
Proportional Effort
How many visitors will you get with that phrase? Probably Peanuts: Remember that you still have to create the page and promote it with a link strategy. So how many long-term keyword phrases (and content pages) will you need to target to get reasonable traffic? Sites with high rankings for “directory” or “directories” or “business directories” are also likely to do well for this long-tail keyword phrase because the power phrase is “directory” or “business directory.”
Okay, if you choose the killer phrase, no one is going to fool you by saying it’s going to be easy! However, targeting 1000 visitors per day from a key phrase has its attractions! But as before, you have to create the content and have an extensive link strategy. However, even if your end goal is a page 1 rank, one of the side effects is that you’ll still rank well for long-tail keywords as the campaign unfolds. For example, it will start to rank well in various combinations with the keyword “directory” included.
This isn’t going to happen overnight, but there are plenty of examples where small businesses have gone up against the big ones. Even, for example, in the highly competitive golf market, at least one of the big hitters started from scratch and competes with the big boys.