Most Valuable Keywords

Keywords help customers find your product whether they are part of your website's natural SEO or if they are being used within a paid ad. But all keywords are not created equal. And if your strategy is to use keywords to contribute to your bottom line, you want your keywords to be able to target the right audience and, more importantly, to separate the Browsers from the Buyers.

How to separate Browsers from Buyers

When we look at a typical buying cycle, a customer usually goes through a series of steps, or a journey if you will, of becoming aware of a product before making a purchase.

Typical Customer Journey:
  1. Customer becomes aware of product
  2. Seeks information
  3. Compares to other products
  4. Makes purchasing decision
  5. Completes transaction
  6. Evaluates product after buying and determines its value by keeping or discarding/returning product.
Let’s say that you own a clothing store and someone enters your shop, slowly sifts through all the products displayed on the racks but walks out without making a purchase. Right after you have another customer who walks in with a specific request for something pink and pleated or asks about a particular item in the store. Which customer would you say is further along in the buying cycle?



Customers who are closer to making a purchase will usually have more specific requests and these are the customers you want to target.


Use Long tail keywords

A simple way to target more buyers is to incorporate long tail keywords as part of your SEO strategy. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that are super specific to the product or service you are trying to sell to the customer. For example, if you were getting into the oral health game, an example of a long tail keywords would be “organic tooth whitening”, or “get rid of tooth stains”.

The benefits of using long tail keywords alongside your other general keywords is that customers who are typing in super specific requests into Google, are more than likely farther along in the buying cycle than someone who is typing in a more general phrase or set of keywords. You want to make sure that you catch the customer right before they reach a buying decision and you want to make sure that you stand out with a high page ranking and being able to understand what customers are searching for.

Not only do these keywords target leads who are more likely to be converted into consumers, but another bonus is that there is generally less competition for long tail keywords.


How much will this cost me?

The cost of incorporating keywords in your organic SEO strategy is dependent on whether or not you choose to optimize the site yourself or whether you want to rely on a third party. For paid ads be prepared to spend but make sure to keep a budget in mind so you can see if you’re getting any return for your paid ad efforts.

When putting together an AdWords campaign, you want to make sure that you are choosing the right keywords to advertise your product or service. This is the first step in putting together a great campaign (on how to quickly put together an AdWords campaign, refer to our how-to Google AdWords guide.

There are two main factors that decide on how expensive a keyword is. How many other advertisers there are competing for the same keyword and how many monthly searches each keyword registers. Since specific phrases generally have less competitors than general keywords, it’s worth making time to come up with a list of long tail keywords that can help target customers who are ready to buy and contribute to growth in sales. This means, when dealing with a CPC (cost per click) campaign, that you are paying far less but reap potentially higher conversions.

The only caveat is that there may be a low volume of monthly searches as well, so make sure to use tools like Google’s keyword planner to locate keywords that have low competition and a healthy amount of monthly searches, and fine tune campaigns as you go to see which long tail keywords are working and which are not.

Long tail keywords are a great way to target customers who are almost ready to make a purchase so it’s important to make sure your ad for a product or service is visible to them. Have questions? Contact us to learn more.