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Depending on the industry your company (and website) operates in and the content on your site, there might be hundreds of keywords that you could target with your onsite SEO (incorporating keywords naturally into the on-page content and meta information of each page of the site). Best practice dictates that you only target 2-5 keywords per page in order to keep it natural and avoid \u201ckeyword stuffing\u201d, which means you\u2019ll have to get picky.<\/p>\n
Even if your keyword research was on the right track, you might miss the mark when it comes time to choose the most appropriate keywords for your site and your SEO goals. One of the most common keyword research mistakes that site owners make is that they don\u2019t choose keywords that are specific enough for their website. They are still in the right ballpark, but they didn\u2019t take it all the way and are missing out on valuable SEO opportunities.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s say your company offers B2B lead generation services. Obviously, keywords like \u201clead generation,\u201d \u201cb2b lead generation\u201d and \u201clead generation company\u201d are going to be incorporated into your site on various pages. However, these keywords are so broad that you might run into a few issues in your quest to improve your organic SEO. First and foremost, the broader the keyword the larger a search volume it will have, which means more companies are competing for that keyword. This makes it much harder to rank well in the search engines.<\/p>\n
Secondly, broad keywords like \u201clead generation,\u201d could potentially drive a lot of traffic to your site, but they might not be sending the RIGHT traffic to your site. What kind of lead gen services does your company actually offer? Live telephone leads? Online leads? Do you specialize in a particular niche like real estate or finance? Those broad keywords might accurately reflect your business, but chances are there are quite a few long tail keywords that are even more appropriate.<\/p>\n
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Why is it so important to target those long tail keywords? Site owners often wonder why they should target a keyword that only gets 250 searches a month when they could target one that gets 2,500 searches. The answer is simple\u2014those long tail keywords are going to bring a more targeted visitor to your site. Someone searching for \u201clead generation\u201d could be looking for a multitude of things and might not be ready to buy anytime soon. Broad keywords are typically used when visitors are still in their research mode and are \u201cshopping around.\u201d Or, they could simply be looking for information, as opposed to looking to hire a company that provides a related product or service. However, if someone found your website after searching for \u201cb2b live lead phone transfers,\u201d chances are they know exactly what they are looking for and are looking to make a purchasing decision soon. You might only get 10 visitors each month by targeting \u201cb2b live lead phone transfers,\u201d but they are a much more targeted and highly qualified visitor.<\/p>\n
Utilizing long tail keywords is also beneficial today because search behavior has changed. People are now searching using full sentence questions and the search engines have adapted their algorithms to meet the needs of these searches. The search engines no longer pick out specific keywords in a search query but rather look at the search query as a whole in order to determine what the searcher is looking for. This semantic search aims to understand the searcher\u2019s intent, and answer the question they have.<\/p>\n