We all prefer our customers to be serious shoppers with money ready to spend. There is nothing worse than wasting valuable time with a customer who isn’t serious about a purchase. Whether at your bricks and mortar location or your website, you want to draw motivated shoppers versus window shoppers. So how do you drive top quality traffic to your website? The kind of traffic that is ready to buy?

SEO (search engine optimization) is an excellent tool to build website traffic and top rankings on Google. But searching on any old keyword isn’t enough. To get the best prospects for your business, you need to focus on “long tail keywords”. Long tail keywords are keywords of three or more words. For example, searching on “cars” isn’t as effective as searching for “used cars for sale under $5,000”.

Long tail keywords work to your advantage because there is less competition for them. With long tail keywords, you get higher search engine rankings more easily. Most importantly, consumers who search for more specific things are more likely to be serious shoppers ready to spend their money.

The reasons to focus on long tail keywords are simple:

• Focusing your SEO efforts on long tail keywords will over time, lead to more search engine traffic because you will have more pages indexed.

• Long tail keywords will produce higher page rankings because there is less competition for them.

• You will find your best prospects through long tail keywords. They’ve already taken the energy to think about what they specifically want or need; now they are on your site. These people are more likely to subscribe to your blog, email blasts and read your advertisements.

• Long tail keywords generate higher sales. Shoppers who use long tail keywords are motivated and looking to spend money. Skip past the window shoppers and focus your energy on the serious shopper.

Focusing your SEO energy on long tail keywords will deliver the customer who is most likely to spend money at your site. Isn’t that what we all want?

Search engine optimization (SEO) budgets are increasing as marketing executives gain knowledge of how SEO can benefit advertising and marketing campaigns.  eMarketer is reporting that SEO budget allocations are expected to rise in the coming years as compared to other search marketing strategies.

With the decline in the economy, customer acquisition is becoming more and more vital.  As the focus on customer acquisition increases, SEO becomes a more vital part of the overall marketing strategy.  Because SEO provides a long term strategy for increased consumer presence, it has added value as compared to paid search marketing.

“Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics” reports that SEO growth will grow from 17.7% to 20.3% while paid search will decline from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013.  When searching for information, consumers find more value in organic search results than pay per click (PPC) advertising.  The value placed by consumers on organic search results garners more clicks on these results thus making SEO a valued part of the marketing plan.

SEO Market Growth

Combining SEO and PPC marketing efforts may result in higher search engine result rankings.  Paid search engine advertising offers more immediate results, but in order to see results in the search engine arena advertising must be consistent.  SEO marketing results occur over a longer time frame, but result in organic search results more valued by consumers.

In order to gain the most information and knowledge of your results, Web analytics is necessary.  Having solid feedback regarding your SEO and PPC marketing efforts will allow you to gage how successful your campaign is.  More traffic is only positive if the cost of the search ad relative to the conversion doesn’t reduce your bottom line.

SEO is a bit like a good public relations strategy; it helps to bring top of mind awareness to your site.  SEO gets them in the door, so you can complete the deal.