All of long tail traffic vs part of main keyword traffic?

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paulseowork

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Nov 15, 2011
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Why do many recommend focusing on long tails/EMD/etc that only take in ~1000 searches a month?

Even if you are not on the first page of search results, can't you still get residual traffic for a keyword that has 100k-1000k searches a month that will match or even exceed the long tail traffic?

Isn't it easier to aim for 0.1% of 1000k searches rather than 100% of 1000 searches? Why are microniches so popular versus just getting a piece of a very large pie?

I can see that long term is important for capturing buyers of products, but if you are going for more adsense or CPAs, does it makes sense to carve out a piece of that big pie, or are they really that saturated so you get 0% in the end, not even 0.1%?
 


diversification of incoming keywords, lower competition & typically higher conversion rates. Also when you add up all the longtail traffic it can rival/exceed the high traffic kws.
 
omgyams said:
diversification of incoming keywords, lower competition & typically higher conversion rates. Also when you add up all the longtail traffic it can rival/exceed the high traffic kws.
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Exactly! Exactly! Exactly!

Especially, the last point. That's the whole idea behind the "long
tail": it contains more traffic than the "head" of the bird.

Although, when we did MFAs by the thousands, any traffic would do. :D


Bompa
 
One of the biggest things for me is competition. My only website in the education niche is a 180-200 search/month. I have the emd for it and a nice 20 page website. I'm number 1 and will stay there because nobody will ever bother to put the work in doing what I did to attain it. It's just not worth it to most people.

Many niches under the 1,000/month mark won't have the continuing competition that you see with other niches. I focus some of my portfolio on them because I want stuff on teh internez that I can just set and forget without worrying that 50 people are doing continuous seo to get to number 1.

When you're starting out I suggest you ONLY target 5-10 very low comp keywords under 1,000. It's nice to look at your stats and see yourself on the first page. It gives some modest traffic that you can test all kinds of fun stuff on. The data that you get when you first start out is waaaaaay more important than the money.
 
It's the simple explanation of quality over quantity.

Usually the longer the keyword, the more intense the problem. And most
often, the more intense or immediate the problem, the faster people will
take action to solve that problem.

For fun, let's look at two keywords:

"dog urine"

"how to clean dog urine from the carpet"

Which of those keywords do you think has more immediate problem?
Obviously the longer tail version. So even if it has 100x less demand, I can
almost guarantee it will convert 100x higher than the extremely generally
traffic you get from the vague general keyword. Not to mention it will be
much easier to rank for.

My two cents. Hope it helps!
 
Ok, thanks for all the replies. The points I liked:

1) If there's less competition, you don't have to worry about getting swamped out by competitors over time.

2) Better mindset of users on long terms. I guess even if they are Adsense sites, I want to get clicky, knowledge hungry people.

So even with the same number of visitors, long term might be more desirable than a generic keyword, at least for a small time fry like me.
 
Most money I've made online was because of my sites that had major longtail traffic. Yet I still get caught up on EMDs and such, it is what it is.... Excellent thread topic BTW.

Edit: The other great thing about longtail traffic is that it's like having a massive portfolio of KW's that balance out in the end(some go up down while others come up), on the other hand if you are getting all of your traffic from a great EMD, Google can cut off the spicket just by dropping your rank for that one word.
 
Before I ever really knew what I was doing I setup a small web hosting business. I'm not gonna lie, it's still a very competitive niche to rank for from an SEO perspective. Getting even %.01 percent of those very competitive terms is extremely hard in comparison to some of the longtail keywords.

longtail you might be able to rank in a short period of time and get 2-3 sales per month.

Those competitive niches that get hundreds of thousands of searches, it is hard just getting noticed at all and ranking for much of anything but longtail keywords. I think there is still a lot of money to be made in small niche's and it is easier to rank and stay ranked with them. That is just my personal philosophy but I have no doubt that if you are confident you could go into a niche like health, web hosting, computer hardware, or something along those lines and kill it if you think you can compete with the other companies that are well established.
 
Transplant said:
When you're starting out I suggest you ONLY target 5-10 very low comp keywords under 1,000. It's nice to look at your stats and see yourself on the first page. It gives some modest traffic that you can test all kinds of fun stuff on. The data that you get when you first start out is waaaaaay more important than the money.
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Pretty good advice
 
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