Potential Barriers

Many company leaders and managers have their own interpretation of how they want their brand to be portrayed and ostensibly perceived online. A luxury second hand car dealer, for example, may only want to include the words ‘pre-owned automobiles’ on their web site, and not ‘used cars’. The fact that thousands of people are searching for a used car, and very few are searching for a pre-owned automobile needs to be communicated.

Existing Brands

If a company decides to sell Nike trainers online, the market is pretty competitive, and the Nike brand itself is predominant.

Generic keywords

Focusing on generic keywords that gain an enormous number of searches, but which also have an enormous amount of competition is usually not worth it unless the keyword is highly likely to provide you with converting traffic, and unless you have a very big marketing budget. Jill Whalen goes as far as to say that knowing the top words searched is of no value at all .

While determining what a company’s core ‘generic’ offering is, sourcing and data mining all the combination and permutations of how the words are used in conjunction with other related terms can provide a wealth of what are termed ‘long-tail’ keywords. (See below)

Overlooking geographic targeting

Depending on what a company sells or offers, overlooking the likelihood of the inclusion of geographical locations in the search query may be highly detrimental. The following are examples of queries with city names included in a search: ‘homes for rent Edmonton’, ‘used car dealer new york’, ‘Chicago hotels’, ‘Vancouver Chinese restaurants’ etc.

Long Tail

The long tail is a type of statistical distribution where a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually "tails off".

The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant traffic. The long-tail is unlikely ever to exceed searches for a brand name if the brand name is reasonably well established, but the volume of converting traffic these terms can generate by nature of their specificity and relevance is worth investigating. Ken Jurina reiterates that thorough keyword research consistently uncovers surprising topics in every study and presents him with numerically supported ratios that challenge his assumptions about his industry.