Targeting Niche Keywords in Search Engine Marketing

by Scott Allen

I just read a great article on Search Engine Marketing for niche keywords, entitled “The Long Tail of Search” on SEOChat.com. Everything stated in the article is absolutely true.

It basically talks about how there is a large portion of the market that gets ignored when search engine marketing. Often, you can get a huge increase in hits by targeting a lot of very specific niche keywords - the “long tail”. These may net less visitors per keyword, but the ones you get will have a much higher conversion rate. They are typing very specific terms into the search engine because they already know what they want and are ready to buy it.

I discovered this concept about 5 years ago when I was doing search engine marketing for a fitness equipment company where I was Marketing Director. We placed ads on Google and other top search engines, and targeted very specific keywords for fitness equipment. We didn’t just buy ads for “treadmill”; we bought ads for “refurbished Life Fitness 9500 treadmill” and such. It worked out very well, and people had a much higher conversion rate than the more general keywords like “treadmill”. Take note that you need a broad spectrum of these niche keywords, as one or two won’t give you enough traffic to do much, but several hundred of these can deliver some impressive targeted traffic and sales. This does take some time to put together, but the results can be awesome.

During this time I perfected this technique and developed several other powerful internet marketing techniques that hadn’t been used in the fitness industry before. Our profits grew by tenfold within two months. After seeing our success, many of the fitness companies (even the big ones) attempted to copy our marketing efforts. In large part this technique of niche keyword targeting got ignored, and it is surprising how few people put this into practice today.

I encourage you to put this into practice in your search engine marketing and optimization efforts. For more info, read this excellent article: “The Long Tail of Search” or contact me to discuss how we can implement this for your business.

Tags:
search engine marketing | search engine optimization | sem | seo | webgeek