SEO: Adwords – chasing your long-tail – getting proper qualified traffic

The thing to remember when trying out a PPC (pay-per-click/Adwords) campaign is not to get too hung up on the prime keywords which are seen as “high-value” – they will demolish your budget eye-wateringly fast as they are typically either brand-centric or too generic to really initiate a conversion into $ – let the big players spend on them.

Where you want your visitors landing is on the “long tail” pages which is generally where you have a call-to-action for the user to purchase something. This long tail strategy is something which is becoming more important as time goes on, there are so many products out there that it is becoming less worthwhile for new smaller businesses to focus on just one or a few products to sell hundreds/millions of, but rather have many different products with less competition and sell fewer of each.

Take the keyword “Porsche” – last I checked this was a rather expensive keyword in Adwords, bids of $10-20 per click were standard. Now have a look when you search for it – Porsche themselves are usually in the Adwords! Why? The only others with enough clout to list on this generic keyword are high-volume sales websites such as carsales.com.au and drive.com.au. Aussie Exotics probably doesn’t even rank in the first 10 pages – it’s just too generic to bother fighting for traffic over as what does the punter actually want?

If you had a bricks’n’mortar shop that just happened to sell Porsche brakes would you want the entire store filled with people just interested in Porsche stuff in general? Like nerds interested in the history, or people just wanting to lick windows, or some guy visiting from the other side of the planet who happens to own one but will never buy from you, or someone looking for scale models, or… etc etc.

No. It’s about getting qualified traffic.

Whilst it might be fun to have your physical store filled to the brim ONCE, what you want are people who are almost certainly there to actually buy something.

So, a search for “Porsche for sale”, this gives a much better idea of what someone wants and if it’s your core business then it’s probably worth fighting for, but really – it’s still too generic. What guy who wants to buy a Porsche doesn’t already know pretty much what model he wants? Again, it’s not something I would bother wasting much time or $ on.

Remember, I’m just using these terms simply because they’re semi-relevant here on AussieExotics.com – you could be talking about pushbikes or video games or catering etc.

The gravy is in ranking in the first page and especially top 6 (above the fold) for highly-qualified search terms, so things like “Porsche 996 GT3 for sale”, “Porsche 996 tyres Melbourne”, “Import Porsche 911”, “Porsche servicing Sydney”, “Porsche 997 wheels”, “Porsche Cayman scale model” etc – these are terms from people who obviously are looking for somewhere with relevant specific information and most likely to convert.

So really it’s about ensuring you rank well/pay well for the most qualified phrases, rather than generic keywords – unless you just get off on having non-paying traffic. The best combinations can be broken down into types of keywords…

Brand – Porsche
Product – 996 GT3/Classic/Race car
Category – Sports car/Model/Ancilliaries
Location – Adelaide/Australia/Victoria
Action – For sale/Insurance/Servicing
Qualifier – Cheap/Low mileage/Restored

Try to identify exactly what you are offering to customers, and then build relevant content which targets a combination of 3 or 4 of the above types of keywords, make several pages – each focussing on a specific subject but which funnel down to the conversion page.

Eg from the above keyword types if I wanted to get specific traffic I would make pages relevant to the following:

Classic Sports car Insurance
Porsche 911 Race car engine
Classic Porsche for sale
Porsche 996 GT3 Adelaide

As you can see each of those are taking 3 or 4 keywords to create a targeted keyphrase which is going to be useful to the end user, it’s less traffic, but it’s highly qualified and much more likely to result in a conversion.