Recent research on SEO Scientist backs up our SEO policy
A recent comment (July 12th, 2009) on SEO Scientist suggest “it may be worth our while to go for the long-tail traffic”, a tactic eXtraSearch have been using very successfully for many years.
The reason for this is the fact that over 85% of clicks come from just the top 3 positions in the search engines. This means that if your website ranks 4th / 5th or 6th it will not achieve anything like the number of clicks as 2nd / 3rd or 1st.
So for really competitive keywords why place all the effort (and cost) in ‘just a few really competitive keywords’ which may only reach positions 4 or 5. The same effort could get thousands of ‘long-tail keywords’ into the top position. This is certainly a technique eXtraSearch have been using for many years to significantly increase the number of natural visitors to client websites. It is often easier and more beneficial to get many thousands of keyword phrases into position 1 on Google.co.uk than get the main generic keyword into position 4 or 5.
The article referenced above can be found at http://www.seo-scientist.com/google-ranking-ctr-click-distribution-over-serps.html. This is an interesting article, although the comment about webmasters not being able to check these statistics themselves is not quite accurate, as it is now possible to get this data for some search engines. This will only deal with the niche market of the website – but this is exactly the data you need to make strategic SEO decisions
A case study showing how 'targetting the tail' in SEO resulted in over 6,500 keyword phrases on first page of Google.