What are people searching to find your product? After a link building project this last week, I had an ah-hah moment that caused me to think more strategically about how people search and how to help clients gain more search visibility. Are there ways to increase the size of your long tail by thinking about keywords that are in the same product category but outside your niche product line?
One thing I’ve seen is some clients are super focused on getting rankings for hyper-specific low volume long tail keywords. For example: Fat-free, vanilla coffee drink. With the long tail, many hyper-specific low volume keywords can add up. Maybe you also gain traffic from:
- Healthy vanilla coffee drink
- Fat-free vanilla coffee beverage
- Vanilla coffee drink with low fat.
These words are all basically synonymous. If I’m a producer of “fat-free, vanilla, coffee based energy drinks”, perhaps this is how my product fits within the beverage category (albeit abridged). You can see that the product is quite niche when you take into account the entire beverage category.
When building/optimizing my website, if I only target long tail variations of “fat-free vanilla coffee drink”, I am severely limiting the amount of potential traffic that is searching for phrases relating to:
- Energy drinks
- Coffee drinks
- Cold drinks
- Morning drinks
- Vanilla drinks
The main point I’m getting at is, don’t limit your keyword research to just hyper specific long tail search traffic. Begin to think about how your product fits within the ecosystem of your product category. Even if you want people to think of your product as a fat-free coffee drink, to gain the most traffic, you’ll want to use variations of keywords on your site that target each one of these bullets.
I understand that ranking for “coffee drink” is going to be much harder than “Fat-free, vanilla coffee drink”, however, you’ll benefit from a competitive analysis and long-tail traffic acquisition perspective if you look at your product from 30,000 feet.
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