Whilst many traditional SEO strategies view a site as a holistic entity, another approach which is growing in appeal amongst the search community is to create a strong association between a specific keyphrase and a specific page – ie a ‘deep’ approach rather than a broad one.
Whilst clearly many sites cannot base their traffic numbers solely on the basis of a few well ranked keywords that are indexed and paired with sub-pages within a domain, the approach complements a broad strategy, where each link offers an incremental overall benefit to the whole site, effectively giving the best of both worlds.
Pete Goold, Managing Director of Punch, which has evolved from its roots as a PR agency, commented:
“The whole issue of branded versus unbranded keywords is interesting in the context of a deep versus a broad strategy – in effect it’s a question of making a judgement on a number of levels in terms of the most rapid route to traffic.
“On the one hand a deep approach will yield less overall benefit and relies on the success and prominence of one or possibly two specific terms per page. In other words, if interest in this term diminishes then the strategy will be less effective.
“However, a broad strategy relies on the continual improvement of the site and, on external factors, such as competitor activity, to a far greater extent. Conseqently whilst it’s ideal to rank as broadly as possibly and thereby cover all bases, it’s neither practical nor effective to do so, hence the growth in the appeal of the deep strategy as a swift route to traffic, if managed well.”