People seem to think just because they have a keyword or key phrase on the first page of Google that it automatically means people will buy their product/service. That isn’t the case. Generic keywords, also called short keywords, are words or phrases with a relatively wide scope. Generic keywords tend to produce a large number of matches and because of that they also tend to have a higher cost when using pay-per-click advertising.
The problem with using generic keywords in your marketing strategy is that generic keywords compared to long tail keywords usually have a much lower conversion rate. Let’s consider this example. You own a company that sells air fresheners for cars that you plug into an outlet.
If you optimize your site for the generic keyword ‘air freshener’, look what happens when you type ‘air freshener’ in Google.
Look how many results are returned – about 8,040,000. That’s because the results include air freshener for home, air freshener reviews, air freshener, and more. You haven’t narrowed the search down to air freshener for cars.
Now let’s say you’ve optimized your site for air freshener for car. Let’s see what’s changed?
You’ve narrowed the returns to 418,000 and better yet, with a longer keyword phrase you’ve also narrowed the results to something that is more tailored to your specific product. It no longer includes air fresheners for the home. But it still includes the cardboard scented air fresheners that you hang on your mirror. The problem is you don’t sell those.
Let’s narrow the search even more and optimize your site for the keyword phrase, ‘plugin air freshener for car’. Now look how many results you have. It’s a much shorter list, but the results are narrowed down to exactly the product you sell.
Generic keywords can have a much lower conversion rate due to their wide scope of meaning. Another way to think of it is like this, long tail keywords are used by people who are already aware of your product and generic keywords help people discover your product when they have not yet chosen a specific brand or company. They are looking for a product known by a generic name (e.g. “air freshener”). Your generic keywords could be the name of your product, product category, and even the problems your product solves (odors in cars). For this reason, identifying and optimizing around these types of generic search terms is critical for a successful search and conversion effort. Even better, use your long term and generic keywords together to optimize your search results.
Useful Tips When Developing Your Keyword Strategies
- Generic keywords are most useful to optimize your web pages.
- Long-tail keywords are the bread and butter of blog posts.
- Brainstorm blog topics by reviewing your long-tail keywords, and vice versa!
- Online Keyword tools and keyword generators will help you research the tools that are right for you.
- Brainstorm keywords by thinking how your buyer personas would search for solutions to their problems.
Search engine optimization and getting on the first page of Google for generic keywords is great, but it’s not the only answer to online marketing. You must combine many online marketing strategies to help your business prosper online. Strategies like, email marketing, local SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, blog writing, press releases, free e-books, and social media marketing, can all be very effective alone, but when combined the chance of success grows exponentially.