On the subject of buying ads against those "long-tail" search terms, I see a lot of times when I'm in the research-phase of a purchase cases where it looks like a company has bought the right search term, but they've completely failed to provide the information I was looking for. I scroll past the Google Ads not because I'm not interested in the bought-and-paid-for results, but because they suck.
If you're buying "best golf clubs for beginners" and you dumped me to golf clubs category page, I'm just going to close the tab and go back to the next result. Get me information specifically about the beginner golf clubs you offer. Put up a nice article describing what a beginner should look for and which of your products fit the bill best. If I walked into a store and asked "which set is best for beginners" and your salesman silently pointed me to the golf clubs aisle, I'd probably look around for a minute and then just walk out since I don't want to make a purchase flying blind.
Look how much google loves About.com. Everybody knows that site sucks - the information is half-assed and spammy, but they know how to create content that matches the search terms perfectly. If I ask Google a question, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get an About.com article that will provide a surface-level discussion directly pertaining to my issue. The fact that the article sucks is irrelevant, because most people are Googling these questions because they're too deep in the dark to know the article sucks.
Thanks for this comment - I think it's really valuable.
If I dare mention my SEO work for a minute - I've seen on so many occasions my "informational" content outrank my "product/conversion" content - so in that respect Google looks as though it follows the user interest just as you described.
So I definitely agree that we should create pages for the term in question and make the user happy. For instance, label 10 drivers that are great for beginner golfers, why they are great for golfers, maybe a YouTube video of a store pro using it and then just a small ad indicating you have said driver in stock, or you can get 15% off etc.
Much better than just planting a big BUY NOW product page, category page or equivalent. If you're targeting these keywords, either for PPC or SEO, meet the searcher's intent.
>>"What’s more: they are infinitely scalable. You could rank, ten, twenty, fifty of these kind of keywords just as easily."
Making a page rank for a keyword involves having some local domain inbound links and some inbound links from external domains, inaddition to the usual in-page optimisation. It seems like getting those links to 50 pages is not easy and is not scalable. What am I missing?
If you're buying "best golf clubs for beginners" and you dumped me to golf clubs category page, I'm just going to close the tab and go back to the next result. Get me information specifically about the beginner golf clubs you offer. Put up a nice article describing what a beginner should look for and which of your products fit the bill best. If I walked into a store and asked "which set is best for beginners" and your salesman silently pointed me to the golf clubs aisle, I'd probably look around for a minute and then just walk out since I don't want to make a purchase flying blind.
Look how much google loves About.com. Everybody knows that site sucks - the information is half-assed and spammy, but they know how to create content that matches the search terms perfectly. If I ask Google a question, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get an About.com article that will provide a surface-level discussion directly pertaining to my issue. The fact that the article sucks is irrelevant, because most people are Googling these questions because they're too deep in the dark to know the article sucks.