I have been studying some keyword theory lately.
Basically there are 2 types of keywords you can try to rank for: long tail (easy) or big head keywords (hard).
So a long tail would be like “dark roasted coffee beans”
A big head keyword would be “coffee beans”
And a really big head keyword would be “coffee,” all by itself.
Now if you ranked number one for “coffee” that would be huge traffic. But it is impossible to do it just about.
So the question becomes, can I meet my income goals by ranking for a ton of long tail keywords?
Griz over at Make Money Online for beginners says this is not the right strategy. He says you want to instead go after the big money phrases like “coffee” and maybe “coffee beans.”
Get the big traffic and the money will follow.
However, I am in an ultra competitive niche when it comes to those big money keywords and I believe it is a waste of time to chase them. They are really, really hard to rank for. Like it would take a few years to even make page one of Google for the terms at all in most cases. In order to get from #10 on Google up to #5 on Google would probably take another year at least. And then to crack into the top 3 would take another tremendous effort. Taking over #1 is not even realistic at all in my opinion.
I could be wrong on this. But I don’t think so as I have worked on some medium-level competitive keywords and saw how hard it is to move them up the serps. What I really need are more targeted niche ideas.
The alternative is to target the long tail. Right now I am really not doing this actively as it takes a lot of dedication to write every single day while targeting a keyword list. It is much easier to crank out a quality post each day if you are not restricted to a certain topic and post title in order to target some keywords. Doing so can be quite boring and difficult.
So right now I am at a bit of a crossroads with my keyword strategy going into the future. I am seeing that both paths are difficult and it is tough to figure out which one to focus on. You can either target the head of the long tail and go for big money keywords (very difficult), or you can try to carve out a niche business and target the long tail (high volume).
I will keep you posted on which way I am heading with this though…..stay tuned for future updates, etc.
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