Many times, clients ask us if they have to pay for ranking for keywords that they weren’t targeting. The answer is no.
Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.
Every website will inevitably rank for certain keywords and phrases that weren’t being targeted. It’s a part of the natural order of the Web. Some of those keywords will actually prove to be beneficial for you.
It’s nearly impossible to predict what people will search for. Google has said that a 20%-25% of its search queries are brand new searches that have never been seen before. That effectively means that you’ll see a certain number of queries in your server log delivering traffic to your site in unexpected ways. That’s the power of the long tail.
If you can target long tail searches over a long course then you can penny and nickel your way into top search rankings one long tail search at a time. Eventually, if you win enough of the long tail phrases, you’ll start to rank for the general search phrases in your niche as well. And you’ll see loads of traffic coming to your site just because you were persistent enough to pursue the long-tail strategy.