For many business owners, the thought of ranking number 1 in Google for such ambiguous terms as “cars” or “clothes” or “guitars” is great - it will bring them heaps of traffic and they will see thousands of sales because of it.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Such vague terms tend to bring in more browsing visitors than actual paying customers. This is because there is nothing targeted about these terms.

Imagine for one moment that you sell clothing. You sell a range of skate clothing aimed at males in their teens to their late 20’s. Thus, your key demographic is young men who like alternative music.

Consider these two scenarios:

Jim is looking to buy some new clothes for a party he is attending at the weekend. It’s a university party and that girl from the house down the road is coming, so he wants to impress.

1. Jim goes to Google and searches “clothes”.
2. Jim goes to Google and searches “black skate hoody”.

Now given your target demographic, which phrase would you prefer to rank for? Of course, you sell clothes.

But “clothes” could mean anything.

You could spend thousands of pounds over the course of a year to rank on page one for “clothes”, but end up attracting middle aged women to your site who are actually looking for something to wear at an engagement party!

So in reality, you would prefer scenario 2. Why? Because this is exactly what Jim is looking for.

Relevance is key to a successful SEO campaign. There is little point blowing your entire marketing budget on bringing in tonnes of traffic that, for the main part, will not convert.