Getting Found for Keywords You Didn’t Target

Keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO. Probably the most important part. Most SEO newcomers will conduct keyword research with a view to finding the most important keywords for their market, and will settle for 2 to 3 keyword phrases.

However many forget that searchers frequently qualify their search phrases, and so instead of searching for:

seo consultant

They will often search for

seo consultant + qualifier

The qualifier can be general; in that it is possible to combine it with several other phrases or specific to that phrase.

A general one is UK i.e. seo consultant +UK

Whereas a more specific one is Google  i.e. seo consultant +Google

These qualifier keywords make up what is known as the long tail of search, which accounts for over 50% of all searches. What this means that if their are 100 people searching on the phrase SEO Consultant there are another 100 searching on SEO Consultant +Other keywords.

The phrase SEO Consultant you target directly and the long tail you target indirectly simply by creating a page with a sprinkling of  the qualifier words that you find by doing keyword research and by creating a high text content web page.

What you will the find is that over time you get traffic to that used the main search phrase that you are targeting but you will also get just as much traffic for phrases that you hadn’t even though of.

This is why a mainly text page usually does better than a page consisting mainly of graphics/or video.

As an example I have an established site that has the following stats:

page views/month=65,000

Keywords used= 2,300

Visits by top 5 keyword phrases=30,000

This means that 45,000 visits came from the other keyword phrases i.e. over 50% of the total traffic.

I didn’t specifically target 2,300 keywords only 3 main phrases but because the page contains highly relevant text and not just graphics it gets found by searchers using thousands of different search phrases.

So if you want to get found by keywords you didn’t specifically target then:

• Pick your main 2/3 keywords/Phrases
• Research for main qualifiers
• Create a text page 200-600 words based around those phrases including a sprinkling of the main qualifiers that you found in your research, include plurals and verb/noun derivatives and variations e.g. build, building, built make, made, making

So you target the longtail simply by creating relevant content and being aware of some of the important keyword qualifiers that searchers use.