Choosing keywords for similar products on an ecommerce site

[EricVallee34]

In the case of an e-commerce website, can you optimize multiple pages using the same keyword ‘root’ but including different long-tail variances of that ‘root’?  For example, say I’m optimizing for a site that sells wallpaper. I found search traffic for the keyword “buy wallpaper online,” but no traffic for “Blue Tinted Wallpaper” (or its variants) and no taffic for “Yellow Plaid Wallpaper” (or its variants). Could I effectively optimize both of these pages using the root “Buy wallpaper online”, yet distinguish the pages by using long-tail variants such as “Buy Blue Tinted Wallpaper Online” and “Buy Yellow plaid Wallpaper Online”?   Any examples of this you can point to?

[TellThemEverything]

Well, for a start, its very hard to see traffic figures for long-tail queries - by definition there are thousands of variations that may get only a search or two each month!  I'd focus on finding the keywords that make you money - the long tail will follow if you write good content and have a great natural link profile (varied anchor text)

Find the money keywords using adwords, then optimize your site for those.

[bhochstetler]

That is certainly possible, and it's a smart thing to do in many cases.

The easiest example of this that I could think of was the terms "buy mens nike shoes" and "buy womens nike shoes". store.nike.com ranks highly for both results, but with an almost completely different set of pages for each. Many large brands will have several similar items that are differentiated by the long tail, so you should be able to find more examples fairly easily.