“We want to rank number one in Google.  We want to be number one for <insert highly competitive search term here> and that’s it”.  If I had a dollar for every time I have heard this I would be a rich man.

Generally my first response is a deep breath and then I delve into explaining to the client how search engines work, how, what and why people search and how there are many ways to turn on the lights.

The “head” keyword terms, or tier 1 keywords are the most popular search terms for a given industry.  In the same industry there are likely to be many more long word string terms that form what is called “long tail” search terms.  At first glance it might seem that the tier 1 terms are what you want to rank for, so I can understand the clients thought process, but collectively the long tail terms drive significant levels of traffic also.

An example of a head search term might be “marketing”, an example of a long tail term might be, “marketing online Melbourne”.

It’s obvious that the benefits of ranking well for a tier 1 search term result in massive amounts of drive traffic to the website for generic terms.  The downside is that they are much harder to obtain, take significant time and resources and often the conversion rates are not great.  Conversely long tail search terms are generally easier to rank websites for, drive targeted traffic to the client website and the conversion rate is much higher.

It’s no small point that the head of search really can get a website moving for almost every company but for retailers often the long tail, product, model type, style, colour specific searches are what deliver the best conversion rates.

Of course I am not discouraging from targeting the head search term, but my point is that something must come first and long tail is generally considered to be lower hanging fruit.

Where search can get interesting is that in a roundabout way if you start out targeting the tail search terms, a well structured, well thought out and good content website will eventually build towards rankings in the head search terms naturally.

So, the next time someone says to you the first line in this post, then be sure to have a copy of this page on hand so you can politely explain why “proper SEO is based around and entire website strategy and not just 1 keyword.  The more you build good content depth into your website, targeting the long tail, the more likely it is that you can successfully target the head.