So your question is “What is a Generic Keyword?” well, Let’s discuss
First of all, let us understand what a keyword is. With reference to the internet, a keyword is a word used in text searches on various search engine sites. A user visits a search engine and types certain words on the search engine.
These are the words about which he is curious or wants to gather some information regarding them. Such a set of words that were used by the user to search something on the internet is called a keyword.
Now, the keywords could be anything depending upon the needs and intent of the user. They can be very specific, say for a brand’s certain model number. They can be very general, for instance, a user may search for “best books written”.
Such general keywords have a wide scope. The search result in such cases may result in very broad suggestions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Such keywords are called Generic Keywords.
Generic keywords are searched more by people who have not yet made any decision in a specific direction about a particular topic.
The users might be entering such keywords in order to get a vague idea of things or might be looking at the various options in the search results based on which they might further refine their search.
Also, generic words help people to discover about our enterprise or website at a moment when they might not have chosen a particular brand or a company.
Generic Keywords may be short-tailed, medium-tailed, or even long-tailed sometimes. But mostly they are short-tailed. This is because the longer the keywords, the more specific are the anticipated search results.
So, the chances of generic keywords being long-tailed are lesser. On the other hand, short-tailed keywords are likely to be more generic in nature. For instance, “best Hollywood movies” is more generic than the keywords like “Best Hollywood action movies of 2019 by Dwayne Johnson”.
Generic Keywords are more competitive in nature. Since these keywords are broad in their scope, the pages which compete for such words are more in number. These keywords have a low conversion rate as the website hosting such words might be less likely to be listed at the top of a SERP due to high competition.
Therefore, this also means that these words have a high cost. To have a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign for generic keywords might result in a costlier affair than specific or long-tailed keywords.
This is because the generic keywords would result in more clicks on our advertisements (our ads being placed in the webpages, and these webpages are displayed in the SERPs) but since the user might be looking for some other product, the conversion rate would be lower. And hence, we might have to pay more (to the website hosts) for displaying our ads on pages that target generic keywords.
