NEW: Fred Schebesta

People are getting smarter in their searching, so the keywords you use will have to keep up.

Find keywords that bring profitable customers

Quality keyword research is crucial to the success of your organisation’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.

One key theory used to find quality keywords is the long tail which claims that you can make more sales and profits by targeting a lot of low volume keywords that no one else is competing for rather than three or four keywords that everyone is competing for.

Single keywords like “credit card” are usually very hard to rank for and often demand very high bid prices in Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Furthermore, you can guarantee that a lot of finance and banking companies will be targeting the same keyword so the market will be congested.

Longer keywords and phrases are usually easier to win high rankings for and typically have higher click through and sales conversion rates because they are more targeted to what the searcher is looking for. In the case of our credit card example, some keywords/phrases that could be worth looking at are “bankwest credit card”, “aussie credit card”, “bendigo bank credit card” etc.

The reason behind this is that people are getting more sophisticated with their search queries as they’ve learnt that specific search terms get better quality and fewer search results whereas vague search terms end up with millions of largely irrelevant results. For example:

• Google Australia search for “credit card” – about 2,810,000 results.
• Google Australia search for “bankwest credit card” – about 37,700 results.

To find out these quality keywords you need to put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer:

• Which search terms would you look for if you were interested in a particular product/service?
• What kinds of issues does your problem resolve?
• What are the most common questions about your product/service that are answered by your sales and customer service staff?

If you’ve used the long tail successfully in your SEO or SEM campaigns feel free to contribute your tips and experience by making a comment.

Fred Schebesta’s company Freestyle Media is an established innovative online marketing agency specialising in building search engine friendly corporate websites and running online marketing campaigns.

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