I’ve been getting some great responses to my post 3 Degrees of Separation.  One response was from Janos Glaser.  Here’s what he said:

Janos brings up an interesting point.  In the world of PPC (or pay-per click advertising) and search marketing it is common for people to try and target “long tail keywords”.  For example, a very broad keyword search might be “wedding photographer”.  A long tail keyword search might be “wedding photographer los angeles california black and white”.  When you’re optimizing your site for search engine rankings and if you’re doing PPC advertising, systematically attacking the long tail keyword phrases is a good idea.  The broad keyword searches are more competitive, therefore its harder to get good placement – or in PPC, they’ll just cost you more.

But, I’ll contradict Janos in saying that you should still stay focused on your particular niche.  You can’t be everything to everybody, and if you try, you’ll end up being nothing to nobody.  Be the best you can be at ONE thing.  Then no one can compete with you.  Definitely drive traffic that is targeted to your niche.  The more your traffic is targeted, the higher conversion rates you’ll have and you’ll have an easier time working with those clients.  If you end up driving a lot of traffic to your site that is not targeted to your niche, you’ll spend a lot of manual time weeding people out, trying to talk people into your area of focus, or worse, you’ll end up doing mediocre work because it falls outside of your focus.

Key point: Stay focused.

One more key point: Use long tail keywords that drive TARGETED traffic.  (check out my interview with Pye Jirsa of Lin & Jirsa Photography to see a great example of how to do this)

Good luck.