rambatz - 3:11 pm on Jun 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi all,
I'm a long time casual guest reader who's really appreciated your discussions and ideas over the years. Hope you guys can provide some good insight and ideas that can help me with my problem.

I've always followed the general consensus that long tail keywords are the best to organically optimize for since they are easier to be ranked on the first page. For the high search volume broad/short tail keywords, I've always used PPC to compliment the exposure.

For the most part, this has worked very well. Organic traffic continues to increase quarter over quarter and I rank on page 1 on most of my 30 or so "priority keywords" that I’ve established. My PPC efforts also do a decent job generating leads (atleast I think.. I mean do you ever really know?! :) ) despite only getting traffic from the fraction of people willing to click a PPC ad.

In my keyword space, broad terms like "blue widgets" are theoretical terms with many different types of competiting websites, while long tail keywords like "blue widgets device" is the product I sell so that you can apply the theory.

My problem occurs when I start looking at data of the big picture. By an overwhelming number, my broad keywords leads were the ones that generated the opportunities that end up being sales. I was absolutely shocked by this.

So now I am faced with the dilemma. Do I invest major resources to organically improve my ranking on the high traffic broad keywords or do I continue to try and refine my ranking for the niche specific keywords?

Has anyone out there experienced this? What did you do and did it work? Am I too narrowly looking at the data (e.g. PPC will obviously generate more sales since it draws more commercially intended searchers)?

Many thanks everyone!

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 7:09 pm (utc) on June 5, 2008]
[edit reason] See sticky [/edit]