The Value of Short Keywords
If you do any work researching keywords for your Internet Marketing needs, you’ve probably dealt with the concept of long-tail vs short-tail keywords.
The best example I can think of is based on “golf.” That’s a short-tail keyword. It’s just one word.
Google Golf and you’re going to find a lot of results. Each of these results contains the word Golf. For some reason, possibly mystical, one page has the #1 result. Many look upon this ranking with awe.
“How can I get top ranking for a single keyword?”
Now consider the phrase “buy Nike Golf shirts”. This is a long-tail phrase. Google this and you’ll get far fewer results than for golf, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Someone who types “golf” is probably at the beginning of the online research phase. These are tire kickers. They’re not likely to buy. A million clicks from this bunch might equal a few sales. It also equals server load and requires your website to bear the traffic. What is that traffic really worth?
On the other hand, less gross traffic from people searching for “buy Nike Golf shirts” seems like a high ROI effort to me.
Long-tail keyword ranking isn’t just about finding phrases that are easier to rank for than short ones, it’s about maximizing results.
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