One of the key challenges with the keyword market is that it is a fickle mistress whether you are a lowly start up or a high flier. With keywords being such an integral part of both PPC and SEO campaigns, the right choices can make or break a business. As with most aspects of affiliate marketing, the main strategy should be about you finding a balance, in this case between the core, competitive terms and the longtail keywords. However, this is of course easier said than done. Understanding the merits of both core and longtail keywords as well as realising that the two are not mutually exclusive is a good place to start.

Why do you need to find a balance between the core, popular keywords and their more obscure longtail cousins? The primary reason is that it’s a lot easier to build yourself up in the organic search rankings and produce a stable base from which to operate if you combine the two rather diverting all energies to the core terms. This is because in an ever increasing number of categories, using core terms simply corners you into an extremely competitive market wherein all of your best linking and content creation efforts may have limited impact. When using core, competitive keywords most search engines will focus on the authority and history of your domain and the number of relevant “in-community” links above all else, relegating on page optimisation (where the barrier to entry is perceived as low) to a tiny proportion of the myriad of factors that go to make up your ranking. When you’ve got a partially established brand which is in competition with a mad number of other sites, this means that you can quite quickly slip down the rankings and your hard work will be potentially wasted.

We are not for a minute suggesting that there is no point in focusing on some core terms on your site. As with so many elements of both PPC and SEO, they are an integral part of a long term game plan. However, the focus and balance between core and longtail should primarily be determined by the age and current stature of your site. The more established you are, the more core terms it may make sense to include in your activities. Conversely, new market entrants will need to gain as much leverage as possible with longtail terms before placing much weight on the more competitive terms. Ultimately it is about building a reputation slowly rather than going for the all or nothing keyword war where you’ve got more to lose.

So what do we mean by finding a balance? Essentially it comes down to using core terms and longtail terms in unison, and through this partnership the strengths of each will compliment and augment the weaknesses of the other, creating a workable strategy. This has been proven effective because essentially the organic search value of a set of well chosen longtail terms can be more than equal to that of a single competitive core term — if the longtail terms are comprised of a string of core terms using a “longtail contains” approach. This will create a more specific and targeted set of longtail phrases, generating traffic that will actually find the content of your site relevant.

For example, if you’re aiming at the sporting footwear market then you might consider using “trainers” as a core term to promote your site. However, the problem with that is that not only is the term “trainer” associated with many other off-theme sites (personal trainers, training and education in an endless set of subjects . . .) but it is far too general to necessarily convert well. In this case you’d be far better combining core terms and even brand names, for example “mens running trainers”, “mens Adidas trainers” and so forth. Note that the longtails here contain not only “trainers” but “Adidas trainers”, “mens Adidas” etc.

To throw another hypothetical example out there, if you were targeting the travel market, having “cheap online Sharm el Sheikh package tours” would potentially endow you with the attention of a specific audience. When combining keywords it is important not only that they are relevant and searched for in reasonable volumes, but that they can be easily injected into the content of your site, whether it is in link anchor text or liberally dispersed in your on-site content at sensible densities.

So much for the how and the why, but ultimately you’re in this for the money rather than to experiment with search engine ranking systems and the shifting trends of the average internet user, so why is the balance of core and longtail terms so important from a financial point of view? Essentially it’s down to getting the right kind of traffic to your site, and whether you’re going for PPC or SEO or both, if you combine core keywords into a longtail thread then you stand a far better chance of attracting a more targeted group of visitors who are actually looking for a site just like yours.

And who will thus monetise more effectively.

Although using longtail keywords in unison with core terms can sometimes feel as if you’ve opened a tap half way, that trickle of traffic can more readily be converted into a torrent once you’ve established your site (with traffic data such as bounce rate, CTR and so forth being ever more vital in achieving and sustaining rankings), and the quality of the flow in the longer term will make up for the small number in the early days. One recent statistic suggests that around 20% of searches made each day haven’t been entered for the last 90 days, if at all. This means that both the longtail and the core keyword have an important – indeed vital – place in PPC and SEO of all types, and that putting all of your energies into a core keyword only strategy, whilst rewarding in some cases, is by no means the only road to success. In some cases quite the contrary.

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