Small Ball Strategy in SEO
This afternoon I was reading a post over at inspired startup entitled “The Power of the Small Ball Strategy” which basically promotes testing a variety of small initiatives and strategies and then pushing them, as opposed to putting all resources around one big idea.
I am a big believer in this approach in SEO. As an in-house marketer for a large corporation many times our shareholders will look at Nielsen or Hitwise numbers and want to rank for very general terms, which for newer sites takes a lot of time and resources. We’ve all heard by now that more users are using long tail queries as opposed to general terms.
So is it wiser for a business to go after the general terms or targeted specific terms?
Let’s take the term “recipes” for example. Google has 126,000,000 results for the term “recipes” For a smaller site, their chances of making the homepage for a term like recipes is going to be very slim. But what about a longer tail term like “mexican recipes”? For this term Google has 2,320,000 results indexed for this term. Now obviously the volume is going to be lower for “mexican recipes” as opposed to “recipes” but the more long tail terms that you optimize for the greater your chances are of scoring with natural search.
Or think about this. What type of resources would be required to optimize a site to rank for recipes when their currently on page 20 or not ranked at all? Then whats to say that you can hit page 1 and what resources did you put toward that effort? I’m not saying not to be aggressive and have lofty goals but following the small ball strategy which Andy talks about makes much more sense for a small business or even a large business especially in these economic times.
