I’ve been thinking about keywords and phrases, henceforth referred to as KPs. There’s the pile of a few terms that have the big search numbers up front and a looooooong tail of more specific phrases. The long tail phenomenon is old-hat for the SEO crowd. Most people outside of search marketing probably aren’t familiar with it. They sit down to think of what terms they want to be found for, then come up with a list of terms that are incredibly general. So general, nobody actually ready and willing to buy would be using them. And people come in saying that they want to be number one on the internet for “book” or “computer” or “plastic surgery”.

It’s our job to teach them how search works, that they can’t be number one for those things, and that there are better phrases…KPs that are more specific, that indicate readiness to buy, that may be very specific to their industry area. We see the list and use it as a starting place to find the KPs that will make a difference and will work. But it occurs to me that we shouldn’t just dismiss the general or overly-competitive keywords. The single word KPs need to go, but some of the ones that you won’t win on *but* are likely to be parts of other phrases should get to stick around. Why?

I read that 50% of searches are unique. They’re long, funky strings of words. They aren’t going to show up on the keyword research and tracking tools. But you know what they are going to do? Include the words for the core ideas and features around the product. The one word keywords will wind up in the copy just as you talk about whatever it is you do. Take the term “SEO company”–there are 1,130,000 pages in Google for that term, and WordTracker predicts 996 searches per month on it. That’s some tough competition, but also a whole lot of eyes. Are you going to be #1? Probably not. Especially since it’s SEO–everyone’s site is optimized. But if someone is searching for an Austin SEO company or “Austin SEO company cost of SEO”, there might be enough content on our site about both of those things to make it relevant in one of these longer, unique search queries.

Even more interesting is the difference between “search engine optimization firm” and “search engine optimization company”. The number of searches isn’t too different–about 15%–but there are over 2x the number of competing pages for “search engine optimization company”. It’s just as important to pay attention to what the competition is as to what the predicted search volume is. “SEO firm” has a few more searches than “SEO company, but there are 870,000 more competing pages for “SEO company”. Not that the general terms aren’t worth going after–we’re ranked in the top 50 on Google for “marketing agency”, and it has the highest number of competing pages in this sample with 1.75 million. But that’s because we got the visibility by populating with terms that had it in there already, like terms about our work in B2B web marketing.

So while it’s hard not to squeeze that KP you’re going after in one more time, I think it’s worthwhile to make it a point to include some of those long shots that would be great to have, but so hard to get. Don’t waste the valuable real estate in tags and titles when you could be using the phrases you’re targeting for a good reason, but don’t reject them entirely. Do I have some rule of thumb on percentages and balancing this stuff? Nope. But it is worth taking the extra time and not missing the extra searches you could be getting.