If you've ever spoken to an SEO consultant you'll know how they always bang on about how vital it is to your business' success to be on the first page of Google's search results. And they're not wrong. The only question is which keywords to target.

Using Google's free keyword tool you can enter a key phrase relevant to your business to find keywords that attract the most traffic. Based on this, it can be tempting to focus on the core keyword that gets the lion's share of searches. The more searches the more traffic to your website, right?

The problem is that every other business in your industry with any SEO nous is thinking the same thing. This means that everybody is optimizing the copywriting on their website, blogging and trying to get backlinks for the same few magic keywords. And the problem is that unless you can get in the top 6, you might not be building your SEO strategy the smartest way.

If you're not in the top 6 you're invisible

Studies show that the first position in the search results gets a third of all clicks. The second gets 17%, the third 12% and then the number of clicks falls off a cliff. So even if you are targeting a keyword with a lot of traffic, unless you can get into the top three you could be wasting your time.

An alternative is to target ‘niche' keyword phrases. These phrases on their own might get less traffic then the main keywords but it is far easier to rank highly for them. This means that if you can target enough ‘niche' keywords you can easily get much more traffic than fighting for the more popular ones. You can do this by writing blog posts and articles (or hiring a copywriter to do it for you) which contain the niche phrase spread 3-5 times throughout the content.

Again using Google's keyword tool you can identify what the niche phrases in your industry are and which to focus to get the maximum search engine traffic in the shortest time possible.

Answering common questions can also boost your conversion rate

Another advantage of targeting niche phrases is that they often form part of a question that people have typed into Google. These days people head straight to the internet to find answers and solves problems. This means that if you can build content around answering common questions in your industry then you can build trust in your expertise and attract people to your business. As you'll often read on the latest marketing and copywriter blogs, great content is the new marketing these days.

So as well as skyrocket traffic, targeting niche phrases can increase the conversion rate of your website making it a powerful approach to SEO.