Since the early days, the search engine optimization (SEO) world has been obsessed with rankings. Getting that coveted #1 spot for that one, big keyword has been the driving force behind a huge number of SEO campaigns. There is a never ending list of SEO ranking tools to help you see how well your site is ranking for certain keywords, and how your competitors are ranking, as well.
While those tools can be helpful for keeping score, this focus on rankings misses the point. As any good SEO consultant will tell you, the point of SEO is traffic. Visitors coming to your site. Ranking #1 for your favorite keyword is nice, yes, and #1 rankings do generally tend to bring in traffic. But, ultimately, that narrow focus will probably cost you more traffic than it brings.
If you are spending your time, effort, and SEO budget in an attempt (possibly futile) to get your site to rank in the top 3 spots for some popular keyword, you aren’t spending your time, effort, and SEO budget on all those long tail, niche, keyword searches. This is a mistake because that’s where the real traffic lies.
Let me give you an example from Jobing.com. In many of our major markets, we rank very well for all the big, obvious keywords like “jobs in City”, “City jobs”, and “jobs in City, ST”. However, those big keywords account for just a tiny percentage of our total traffic from search. A much bigger percentage actually comes from navigational searches for “Jobing.com” and related variations. Hooray for branding.
But both of those keyword categories are dwarfed by the long tail. The majority of our traffic in those markets comes from a huge set (we’re talking 10’s of thousands) of unique keywords, each of which gets less than 100 visits per month (and most of which get fewer than 10). Those long tail keywords are a really big deal.
You may be wondering how to get traffic from all those long tail keywords out there. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to intentionally target niche keywords like you would with big, obvious keywords because niche keywords are so hard to anticipate. You don’t really expect someone to search for “mental health receptionist jobs phoenix az," but we got 13 visits from that keyword in one month.
So what’s the solution? First, make sure your site is “search engine friendly." From there, the plan is simple—produce useful content. Here’s a few quick takeaways to help you get started:
As your useful content grows, your long tail search traffic will grow along with it. That’s what SEO is all about.
