In internet marketing, search engine optimisation is one of the most important strategies used to get web sites in front of users’ eyes, and one of the important factors in search engine optimisation is the selection and optimisation of the correct keywords for your web page content.

But, what are the correct keywords? Well, the exact nature of the keywords you use on your site obviously depends on your market and the particular topic of your individual web pages. But, Chitika, an online ad network, has recently released the results of a study, which shows that, if you can rank high for keyword phrases of three to five words in length, you should be able to achieve optimum results for both traffic and conversions.

In other words, the correct keywords for your web site are ones from three to five words long that are relevant to your site and the topics of your site’s pages.

Multi-Term Keywords Produce Best Results

The study looked at search traffic coming into the network over a period of six days and was based on a sampling of more than forty-one million impressions.

Three word searches accounted for 26 percent of all search traffic, while 19 percent of all traffic was generated as a result of keywords made up of two terms and 17 percent of search traffic came from searches where keywords were made up of four word phrases.

An interesting side note is that one word keywords accounted for only 14 percent of traffic, further emphasizing the power of multi-term keywords.

Also, queries longer than five words result in much less traffic, an indication of just how fragmented the traffic resulting from longer queries is.

Longer Search Terms Result In More Revenue

Another interesting fact that surfaced from the survey results is that it seemed that the more words used in a search query, the more likely the searcher was to click on an ad. In fact, the most profitable queries in terms of ad clicks were those consisting of 5, 6 and 4 words, in that order. In other words, the longer the search query in terms of the number of words, the more profitable it was likely to be, with the magic number once again appearing to be 5.

So, what does this mean for you and your internet business? It means that, if you’re not targeting traffic using keywords of 3 to 5 words in length as part of your search engine optimisation strategy, you’re missing out on some substantial and potentially extremely profitable search engine traffic.

For help optimising your web site for these long tail keywords, contact a UK internet business consultant who will set your web site up for success for longer search terms.

Be Sociable, Share!