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Scott Rayden, iSearch Media
Running an effective online marketing campaign starts with choosing the right keywords. The intelligence of the keyword-targeting process is often the primary factor that determines whether your campaign is a success or a complete failure.
There's a very fine line between keywords that will drive high volumes of traffic, and those that are popular enough to drive strong traffic and also targeted enough to the search behavior your particular audience that it will convert visitors into paying customers. We talk to dozens of people each month who don't really understand this critical distinction.
When thinking about what keywords you're going to target, it goes without saying that the more targeted the keyword the better conversion rate you'll see on the traffic you get from it. So the question becomes: how targeted do you need to get? If your keywords are too targeted, there won't be enough people searching on it, and so it'll never drive a strong number of visitors to your site. But if your keywords are too broad, you may have trouble gaining valuable traction on the search term, since there will be a great deal of competition for that real estate; moreover, the visitors you do attract through these general keywords won't convert at rates you're happy with.
To some extent, keyword selection and targeting is a guessing game. It's as much an art as it is a science. That said, there is, of course, some science behind it:
Target keywords that are three or four words in length. Again, the more specific your keyword (in basic terms, the longer your keyword is), the better the chances of a visitor driven through that keyword converting into an actual customer. As with every component of search engine marketing strategy, the following stats will vary a great deal from industry to industry, but these numbers give you a pretty good idea about how keywords of different lengths tend to convert the visitors they drive into paying customers.
1 word keyword phrase = 6%
2 word keyword phrase = 15%
3 word keyword phrase = 32%
4 word keyword phrase = 35%
5 word keyword phrase = 9%
6+ word keyword phrase = 3%
Again, don't forget that broader search terms will of course drive more traffic. But these conversion statistics are an important thing to keep in mind when choosing the keywords you're going to target – in either an SEO or a PPC campaign.
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