Our clients are often under the misconception that their top keywords drive the most amount of traffic to their sites. In fact, the opposite is actually true. The majority of search engine traffic for industrial sites comes from other long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are generally three to five words and are very specific. The graph below illustrates our findings from recent white paper Ecreativeworks published that analyzed 20 industrial websites over a year.
Although they don’t bring a high level of traffic on their own, long tail keywords are quite powerful in the overall picture as you can see. The best way to do this is through copy development. Every page of your site should have 300-500 words and unique meta data. For your most important products or services you should try to have closer to 500-700 words. Remember, every single word you put on your site is a potential keyword.
Your top keywords are of course still very important. You should optimize for them on your home page, top navigation pages, and your main and footer navigation. These areas of your site carry the most weight in the search engines and also naturally tend to coincide with your most important keywords. Request a copy of the industrial white paper here.
7 Responses to Top 10 keyword searches only refer 20% of traffic to Industrial Sites
Absolutely! The true measure of SEO success is how much of your traffic is actually converting to a viable lead or client. This soooooo important especially in the industrial market.
The thing here is long tail keywords. Most of your traffic is going to come from them, and in my opinion you are going to get a better conversion from these customers. Think about it this way. if a customer lands on your digital camera page after a search of the word camera, you are going to have a small chance at getting that custom. Now if a customer lands on your Sony digital camera 350 page after a search of the phrase Sony digital camera 350, you are going to have a lot better chance at converting this costmer.
Thank you for your insightful comments, Mike and Doug. I agree, I come from an ecommerce background and the percentage of orders from long tail to broad searches was consistently higher. In the industrial market, the same seems to be holding true for customers sending in RFQs, Contact Us, and other forms.
Thanks a lot for the info!
I definately agree. When my site showed up on page one on both Google and Yahoo for the term “Industrial Parts” I thought the traffic would come flooding in but that was not the case. Instead I find the majority of my organic traffic comes from searches for the Make & model number of my product.
http://www.rexxindustrialparts.com
You’re absolutely right. Cheers for your very in-depth article.
You’re absolutely right. Cheers for your very in-depth article. Well done