The Continual Argument – Monster Keywords V.S. Long Tail Keywords

Hopefully if you’re reading this, you have a decent grip on link building, backlinks and exactly why websites rank where they do. I’m going to cover some overlooked aspects of SEO and why targeting long tail keywords over monsters is a good idea.

Understanding how and why a website ranks where it does is imperative. If you don’t, read some of my other articles:

• The Truth About Anchor Text And How To Use It
• Blog Networks Shutting Down, The End Of Link Building?

Once you truly understand why sites rank where they do, you can make instant judgments and know precisely what it will take to rank for a certain keyword.

The reality is the monster keywords just aren’t that lucrative. Sure, once you rank for them they’re probably going to make you a lot of money…

And once you know what it will cost you, you can figure out if it’s a good investment. People forget that SEO is just like any paid traffic generation strategy. With paid marketing, you absolutely must crunch the numbers.

You must estimate or calculate how much X amount of paid traffic will make you. You need to know that your marketing is profitable. If you spend $1000 on PPC, you’re going to need to sell at least 11 units of a $100 product to make the marketing worthwhile.

Usually with paid traffic people calculate three things: how many visitors they need per subscriber, how many subscribers they need per sale and how much they can spend per visitor. Knowing those three metrics allows you to spend serious money on traffic.

The same concepts apply to search engine optimization. Unfortunately most SEO’s just pick a few keywords, optimize their sites and start building links. They spend hundreds of hours doing SEO just hoping the keywords they rank for will eventually make them money.

A lot of the time, SEO isn’t worthwhile. Generally, the fools who don’t know anything about SEO want to rank for the insanely high competition keywords. In the Internet Marketing niche, people want to rank for terms like “internet marketing”, “make money online” and “how to make money”.

The kind of keywords that get tens of thousands of monthly searches, the monster ones.

The reality is the monster keywords just aren’t that lucrative. Sure, once you rank for them they’re probably going to make you a lot of money. But – the upfront cost required to rank for monster keywords is usually far greater than the end result i.e. profit.

Long term, ranking for monster keywords is most definitely worthwhile. However, when compared to ranking for long tail keywords; it’s simply a waste of time. It might take you $7000 and one year to rank for the term “make money online”. So that’s seven grand and a whole year of no results.

If you put that money into ranking for long tail keywords, you’d see traffic within weeks or even days. Ranking for long tail keywords is logically smarter. As you should know, the majority of searchers click on the top three ranking websites.

So if you can’t rank top three, there’s really no point in ranking at all. That’s why targeting monster keywords is a shockingly bad idea. Even if you do get on the first page, breaking into the top three positions is difficult. And when you do break into the top three positions, don’t think you’re done.

There’s a lot of maintenance. Why? Simply because you’ve got serious competitors. Everyone chases the monster keywords so if you stop doing SEO when you reach page one you’re going to fall behind. When you stop trying to rank for a monster keyword, the rest of page one will start to outrank you.

With long tail keywords, you generally have far less competition. So there’s very little maintenance involved. In fact, with many long tail keywords you’ll remain on page one for months or even years after you stop building links.

Also, 90% of the time you’re going to generate far more traffic targeting long tail keywords. If you go after a few monster keywords, it will probably take months or even years to rank for them. By that time the monster keywords might not be so popular. Some keywords lose half their monthly searches in a matter of weeks.

One event can kill a keyword. With long tail keywords you’re going to be less dependant on 1 source (keyword). That’s another incredible benefit that most SEO’s and webmasters overlook. Just like you need to diversify your income and traffic sources, you need to diversify the keywords you target.

Relying on 5-10 keywords to send you all your traffic is a ridiculous idea. I laugh at the people who go after the monster keywords as I know, they’ll probably be getting no results a year down the line. They may rank for the keywords, but not in the top 3 spots where all the traffic is. Or the traffic has died down and they’ve wasted all their month.

With long tail keywords you can rank fast so you can predict how much traffic you’re going to get and probably how much money you’re going to make. All because of the speed. If you go after “make money online” on the basis that it now gets 100,000 searches a month and your website converts at 4% from those kind of searchers. Well… You’re freaking high as a kite.

As in 8 months time which it might take you to rank page 1, the keyword may only get 30,000 searches a month and your website might only convert at 2%. In conclusion, target long tail keywords first. If you have the resources target monster keywords, but remember; by the time you rank for them it may be a whole different ballgame.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below.

Comments

Paul

I completely agree with this approach to SEO. Monster keywords are hard to target, and long tail keywords have always worked better for me. Thanks for the great advice!

Susan B.

This is such an eye-opener! I always thought focusing on high competition keywords would be the only way to go. I’ll definitely be looking into long tail keywords now.

Michael

Thanks for this informative post! I was wondering if you could explain a bit more about how to measure the effectiveness of targeting long tail keywords over time?

Emily R.

Great post! I completely agree with the approach of focusing on long tail keywords. It’s much more feasible for smaller businesses with limited budgets. Thanks for sharing your insights!

Mark T.

I’m not sure if long tail keywords can really outperform monster keywords in the long run. Do you have any data or case studies to back this up? It would be great to see some concrete examples!

Kathy S.

This post raised some questions for me. Do you think the competition for long tail keywords will increase as more people become aware of their value? And how would that impact their effectiveness?

John W.

I appreciate your advice, but I’ve had some success with monster keywords, even if it took a while. It might be worth balancing both approaches, depending on your resources.

David P.

Hey, Dave! This is an awesome article. It’s been a while since we last spoke. How have you been? Let’s catch up soon, maybe at the next SEO conference?

Sarah M.

This post resonates with my own experience. I was trying to rank for a competitive keyword and got nowhere. Switching to long tail keywords was the best decision I ever made. Thanks for reaffirming that strategy!

Carlos L.

Have you ever tried using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to find these long tail keywords? I’ve found them super helpful in identifying opportunities. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking them out!

Lily K.

I’ve learned so much from this post! I never realized how much potential long tail keywords had in driving traffic. I’m excited to try out some of these strategies. Thanks for sharing!