How important is it to rank for a product category?

[hoosteeno]

We make a product in a category of products -- let's say "donuts". There are really only 4 major donut companies (lots of artisanal donuts out there, but they're not really competitive yet). One of our competitors has systematically achieved top rank for "donut" and lots of adjacent keywords like "donuts" and "buy donuts".

My question is, does their success ranking for the product category keyword "donut" influence their success ranking for long-tail keywords like "powdered donuts" and "tastiest donuts"? Or, to flip that question, should we try to compete for "donut" before worrying about "decadent delicious donuts"?

Other factors:

• In terms of search volume, as you would expect, "donut" sees 10 to 1000 times as many searches as most of the other keywords adjacent to it.
• We can definitely compete for "donut" -- just trying to figure out if doing so should be our top priority.

[RobCairns]

If you have the capability, definitely go for it.

Since Google is looking more and more at semantic rankings for relevant keywords, "powdered donuts" or "decadent delicious donuts" will naturally follow if you are producing content that ranks for "donuts", especially if you make special reference to these specialty keywords.

The competitor that is ranking for all of these keywords is likely doing so because they have produced content and generated links to an architecturally-fitted site for your industry. If you can replicate and improve on that process, you will out-compete them.

In terms of strategy, you probably want to assign 50% of your monthly workload to "donuts" and another 50% to long tail keywords relevant to "donuts". This way, you can make quick gains on long tail keywords which are easy to rank for, and longer-term gains on your major industry keyword over several months. This strategy helps you double-down on long tail keywords while also building up relevancy and authority for your major keyword.

Looking forward to seeing what other folks have to say on this.

Cheers,

Rob

[brettmandoes]

I think Robert covers it pretty well. I would just add that it will probably be easier for you to rank for the long tail terms like "frosted jelly donut" as well if you're already ranking for "donut" if you've developed a logical hierarchy in your site architecture. When ranking for donuts, creating your sub categories or internal pages linked from your page that's ranking will pass along more authority to those pages targeting long tail terms.

That said I agree with Robert's assessment that assigning your time half and half is a good strategy if you have the resources to do so without becoming stretched too thin.