Traffic Building

So how do you take advantage of all these almost-unique searches your customers are making?

With shorter (1-2 word) keyword phrases, optimizing a page on your site for each phrase is a productive strategy but you can’t optimize pages for unique searches.

The key to ranking for longer keyword phrase searches is to concentrate on producing as much content for your site as possible. You still want to optimize these pages to make them easy for search engines to index and rank, but sheer volume of content becomes more important than targeting individual search phrases.

What you’re trying to do is produce content that contains as many industry related terms as possible. Things like answering questions your customers are likely to ask, tips about choosing features when buying your products, how to use your product to solve common problems, cautions about do-it-yourself solutions, etc.

The more diverse content related to your products and services that is indexed by search engines, the greater the chance that one of your site’s pages will match enough keywords or a phrase in a unique search to rank highly for that search.

A side benefit to writing content this way is that it naturally produces information that’s valuable for your propects and useful to others in your industry. The more valuable your content is the more likely other industry related web sites will link to yours, further boosting your potential rankings.

In future posts I’ll address other reasons why earning traffic for these longer searches is important as well as a few easy ways to generate content that will help you earn your share of the long tail.