Does every keyword need its own landing page?

[EricOliver]

So we're doing a bunch of keyword research. We've identified the big traffic, higher competition keywords and we've identified tons (thousands) of long-tail keywords that would be appropriate. What I'm wondering is: does every keyword need its own landing page (or content page)?

Obviously, we'll be building content for all the primary keywords we're targeting. I'm less mystified about that. What I'm more confused about is what to do about the long tail keywords. For there to be any measurable traffic increase, we need to rank well for thousands of long tail keywords. But it's just not realistic to create thousands of quality content pieces to target each of these long tail keywords individually. So how do you go about ranking for large numbers of long tail keywords?

I saw somebody post about using an FAQ page to target multiple long tail keywords which makes sense but even with that I'm not going to have a thousand questions.

How does one go after large volumes of long tail keywords?

Thanks,

--eric

[Chris.Menke]

Eric, give this a try:

Take one of your long tail keywords, plug it into google search and review each web page that shows up in the first page of results. Note how focused is each one is on that keyword--at the exclusion of any other keywords.  Do other searches on similar long tail keywords on your list and see if the same pages show up in the results or if a different set of pages show up in the results.

If you compare all of your keywords to what shows up in the search results, you're likely going to find a couple of things.  1) You're going to get a tiny taste for how much time and effort it's going to take you to create content for each of those keywords; 2) You're probably going to find that for a majority of your search terms, different sites show up for each search; 3) You're a bit overwhelmed at the realization of how much content you're going to have to create.

If that's the case, do yourself a favor and pare down your list of keywords to a small fraction of the total and work with those as a starting point.  Create your content for what will be your most profitable terms, keeping in mind that the whole purpose of its creation is to get your target audience members to engage with it in some fashion.  Work in your content for your longer-tail keywords to help bring in traffic for those terms as well as to provide ranking strength for your money terms.  When you've got a good grip on that, start branching out into you next tier of keywords.

[xoffie]

Agree with the above, work out what each KW is worth in terms of revenue, however, there are many KW, depending how LT and varied the KW are, that can be targetted within the same page without seeing the list of KW though, it would be difficult to estimate. We've often managed top 3 results for closely related groups of 3/4 variations around a keyword so qualifiers like "cheap" + main keyword or "buy" + main keyword (relating to price/purchase) and also quality like "boutique" or "luxury" or "budget".

[EricOliver]

Thanks very much -- that totally makes sense. I very much like the idea of breaking things down in to manageable chunks and tackling them in smaller batches -- staring at a list of thousands of long tail keywords is certainly intimidating.

To confirm: am I understanding you correctly that the ultimate goal will be to have unique content for all the long tail keywords?

[Chris.Menke]

To start out with, I'd think more along the lines of unique content for each product vs. for each keyword, but yes  you want unique content for each of those pages and each page should be focused on one keyword.