WHERE we find a business operating in a mature segment against well-established competitors in their core (or obvious) keyword phrases, we may need to seek out Long Tail keywords that have higher value, but not necessarily the greatest volumes.

What this means is we begin to look for terms that are more obscure, but still relevant to the topic. The terms we start to look for are not searched for by users thousands of times, they may only be searched for by users 10 times per month. This means that to acquire traffic of any significant volume for the client we need to be managing and targeting a larger number of these keywords phrases.

For example if we are targeting search traffic for the phrase “family lawyer” we might find the cost per click for advertising is anywhere up to $100 or more. Given that almost half the traffic to our sample site bounces (returns to Google by the back button), this makes it almost $200 per user to simply have a look at our website. You can see this is going to get expensive very quickly, and Google loves that!

So instead we need to break down our family law business into segments, and if we find enough of them the ‘sum of these segments’ will provide sufficient volume to meet the level of inquiry we need. These might be Separation, Divorce, Child Custody, etc and within each of these categories we can look to find a myriad of lesser searched phrases, but the cost per click will now be below $10 and heading toward $5.

Another way to get outside the obvious, highly competed-for phrases is to go upstream or downstream. By this you need to think about what the searches might be for a user before or after your product and target them. For example, our Family Lawyer might target “relationship difficulties” or “counselling” prior to Divorce, as people might search for these before they feel they get to the end of the line with their relationship. But our family lawyer can still build some awareness at a far lower cost given lower competition.

By adopting these two approaches we can more economically test our traffic, and we are also confident that more targeted users will be closer to making an inquiry and more likely to convert.

In all SEO work be sure to adjust your site so the landing page (the page your link points to) for the content fits the new targeted phrases, and even your ads and navigation labels will want to be aligned to your target audiences. These all help your site to appeal to you various target segments.

Be sure to keep in mind the balance between core search terms and long tail search terms to ensure that your spread of phrases are giving you the volume of traffic that you require, and these users are converting into actual customers when they do get through to your website.

In this way you will be able to appeal to and capture enough traffic to your site despite significant competition.

See our other posts with SEO and digital marketing tips below…

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