Making Money With Both Broad and Long Tail Keywords
Making Money With Both Broad and Long Tail Keywords
Did you know that keywords are critical for online marketing? When you choose a niche and set up your website, you want to use every means available to you to generate more profit. Although many people seem to miss the fact, keywords are a major player in the arena of making money online.
The whole concept of using keywords is a simple one. These are words that are relevant to your website and bring it to the attention of the search engines. Unless you use the right keywords, your batting average for customer acquisition and sales will be pretty dismal.
Many online entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs understand that keywords are vitally important for traffic, but what they often still don’t realize is that both broad keywords and long tail keywords can be used to bring in the money.
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How do these keywords differ from just using “traditional” keywords? It’s simple to remember: Broad keywords are words that don’t zoom in on the topic – short, one word terms versus phrases. One example would be “car,” versus “buying a GMC Elevation, or “shrub,” versus “how to grow a Tulip tree.”
When you do a search of long tail keywords – aka, phrases – you’ll likely notice that there aren’t as many results for those phrases as there are for broad keywords. But there are more possibilities for those types of phrases, meaning the actual traffic volume can often exceed what you’d get with a broad search ranking.
Your goal when using search engines is to bring in people who know exactly what they want. Someone who just types in the word “cars” could be looking for the animated cartoon, “Cars,” the history of cars, used cars, new cars, and more.
Why use long tail phrases?
People who type in long tail phrases are telling you exactly what they want. For instance, here’s a good one – “How to buy a good off-road 4×4.” If you’re selling a guide on an off-road site about what to look for when buying a 4×4, they might visit your site because you’d know exactly what their needs are compared to someone just typing in ‘trucks.’
If you were in the business of selling self-help products for weight-loss, you could use “health” as a broad search term, but to get more specific you’d use long tail search terms such as ‘heart disease symptoms’ or ‘how to get back in shape after 50.’
Not only will you pull in people searching for information on health in general by using broad terms, but you’ll also get people searching for weight-loss as it applies to their health.
When you start searching for broad search terms for your niche, you’ll discover that there are a lot of searches per month for that word or short phrase. But the more focused you make your keywords, the better your site will perform when the search engine bots crawl your site.
Even more important – you want the people who find your site to be the ones that are looking for what you have to offer. After all, someone who’s looking for baby clothes might not be interested in buying a truck!
Take your time
Choosing your search terms is something you should spend considerable time on. Good, carefully researched terms can make your site a money machine. Carelessly chosen keywords and terms that are far too broad can make your site virtually invisible!
Photo by David McBee
Spending a lot of time researching your competition and their keywords is worth every minute of it. The more you know the search terms others are ranking higher on the search engines for, the more you are able to laser target your own.
How is your site performing? Do you have search terms that pull? Are the search engines a major source of traffic? Are you making money? If so, tell us about it in the comment section. Links are welcome!
