76 Understanding digital marketing Low-trafficked [long-tail] keywords are not so competitive, often consist of four, five or more words, have a lower cost per click and can have a higher conversion rate as they are quite specific indicating that the searcher is further along the online purchasing cycle. Examples might include ‘cheap city centre hotel Dublin’, ‘stags weekend hotel Temple Bar Dublin’ or ‘business hotel with gym and spa Wexford’. Effective search marketing campaigns tend to put a lot of effort into discovering effective long-tail terms, particularly for use in sponsored listings (PPC) campaigns.
Typically it makes sense to take a balanced approach and work with a mixture of general short-tail keywords and more specific long-tail keywords as part of your organic SEO effort, while focusing on highly specific long-tail search terms is likely to yield a higher return on your investment for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns (see page 90).
Focus on one page at a time The list of keywords you’re left with is very important. It essentially provides you with an SEO ‘template’ for your website. One of the key things to remember when you’re approaching SEO is that you’ll be optimizing your site one page at a time. While you’ll look at some site-wide factors as part of your SEO effort, SEO isn’t a straightforward ‘one-size-fits-all’ operation, and each of the existing pages on your site will need to be optimized independently. It’s also highly likely you’ll want to create new pages to maximize your potential search engine exposure for as many of your chosen keyword phrases as possible. Think about it: when a search engine presents results to a user, it’s not presenting whole sites; it’s presenting the individual pages that, according to its algorithms, best match a user’s query. That means each individual page on your website gives you an explicit opportunity to optimize for specific keywords or phrases – and that’s important. ‘Each page in your website will have different target keywords that reflect the page’s content’, says Danny Sullivan. ‘For example, say you have a page about the history of stamps. Then “stamp history” might be your keywords for that page.’ Jason Duke of Strange Logic also emphasizes the importance of optimizing individual pages for specific keywords: ‘These [keywords] become the structure for your site, with a page for every topic. Laying these foundations and allowing them to grow according to what you, your team and your visitors think is the key to successful opportunities to rank.’