It's incredibly easy to want to create a short list of keywords that you want to make priority and then put all of your resources into those keywords. This gives you a smaller number of keywords to work with (usually about 10 to 15), and it allows you to focus on the keywords that are really driving the most traffic. While this makes sense, completely ignoring other keywords can cause a company to miss out on valuable long-tail keyword opportunities that, when looking at the numbers, might actually be just as successful as those highly competitive keywords you have on the brain.
Why You Should Focus on More Than Just Your Primary Keywords
It works best if you look at a possible scenario. Although a high search volume is great and clicks and traffic are even better, it's conversions and then sales that ultimately matters for many B2B companies (B2C companies are slightly different). Consider the following example:
- Let's say that a priority keyword gets 15,000 searches per month, which based on your search ranking delivers 1600 visitors to your website. If there is a 2% conversion rate for that keyword then that means that you will get 32 conversions.
- Let's say that another keyword (not a priority) gets 500 searches per month, which brings in only around 96 visitors per month. If there is an 3.5% conversion rate for that keyword then you will get around 3 conversions.
Clearly the more conversions the better, but you can't forget to look at your actual sales coming from those conversions.
- You might only gain an average of 1 sale per day with the first option (your priority keyword), but gain an average of 1 sale per week with the second keyword. That 1 sale per week though might be more valuable than all the other sales generated from your priority keyword. In other words, it's important to really consider your long-term goal and realize that the keywords with the highest search volume aren't always going to be best for your specific company.
It's also important to realize that it is much easier to move your website onto page one than it is to move your website to spot one for any given keyword. If your priority keywords made it to page one, it doesn't make sense to continually spend all of your resources trying to move them up on the page because your secondary keywords can move so much more in that same amount of time.
Steps to Take to Avoid Letting Your Priority Keywords Take Over
The best thing you can do is stay in constant communication with your SEO agency and let them know your thoughts on priority keywords versus all of your other keywords. Even if you are not currently working with an SEO agency, there are a few steps you can take:
- Re-evaluate your priority keywords and whether or not they are on page one of a SERP.
- Determine if these keywords bring in as many sales over a long period of time.
- Focus on your secondary keywords and moving those up on a search engine as opposed to just trying to move your primary keywords up on page one.
- Evaluate your sales as your secondary keywords continue to rank on pages 2, 3, and 4.
In the end, it's important to realize that it does make sense to put a focus on your priority keywords, just simply don't make them your only focus. There is value in secondary keywords (even if you have 200 of them), and putting an emphasis on both will help your B2B company be successful in the long run.