I examined my logs and I selected 200 visits referred by google within 48 hours. These visits all came through google's first page using different keywords. The niche is seo and web promotion. I don't believe in competitive keywords anymore. The more you run for competition using common keywords like "seo tools, seo promotion, free advertising, free seo, seo companies, etc", the more you get left behind.. Of these 200 visits, no common keyword were recorded. I can't really explain how this happens but these 200 visits all used different keywords.. Common are just "advertising forums, social bookmarks, freelance sites" which put my site from 1st to 3rd page of google. And I am getting around 4 to 10 visits per day with "dofollow" keyword (others said no one is searching for this)... Keyword tracker is useless to me...
My site has a daily unique of around 300 only...and you are saying that 200 is not a great traffic from search engine alone? If my site has a daily of 10K then you are correct..
Really depends on the website itself, some niches don't see thousands of visitors a day and 200 can be considered high traffic for that field. Proper analysis of the field your getting in is crucial. As OP said long tail keywords can be gold, you can easily rank for them and 500 long tails and generate more traffic than it's actual competitive keyword.
You are correct that the long tail is where you'll get the most hits, but I'd still go after the big terms if you can get them. I have a site that is #1 for a fairly competitive term. That term brings less than 1% of the SE traffic to my site. However, variations of that term bring 35% of the traffic to my site. That's a huge chunk. Your point about long tail is well taken since the other 65% of the traffic is long tail...but I'd never want to give up the main term.
Yeah, it's true. Sometimes we focus too much of our effort and time on particular competitive keywords and forget about the rest. I think if we spread around trying with different combination of keywords, that would be even better.
Thanks for your comment guys... I thought I was the only one who noticed about long tail keywords. proper keyword branding and organization still counts but don't get disappointed if your target for a certain keyword is not meet. And another thing is, more content really count.. It is difficult to optimize a site with limited content than a site that has rich content... Funny thing is, other people found my site using wrong spelling sometimes... mostly on "doffolow forums" instead of "dofollow forums".. your own mistake sometimes could help you.. Sky is the limit in SEO
majority of traffic is still coming from long tail keywords, which also generating the good conversion as well.
I agree with your post, But silverdan, sometimes traffic is not all important, how much business traffic you are getting from those keywords that's d main thing, what i feel. If those long tails keywords gives u business, than u are going well, and IMO, for any business site, daily unique 300 visitors are good enough. Best of luck...
yes, childfont...and I can see how these searchers desperate enough to find whatthey are looking for that's why they tried unpopular keywords... these people are serious and they always stay for a minimum of 4 minutes in my site..
just to let you know i'm ranked 1 for a competitive keyword on one of my websites and its the main source of traffic, if you get position 1 not 2-10 you will get LOADS of traffic actually my website became an "authority" website, you can see inner-pages on the results i'm not updating it anymore and still earning very good from it, yes to competitive keyword
Then show us your website and the keyword you said "top 1"... and the competitive keyword you are talking about..