Keyword difficulty/research question

[Grumpy_Carl]

Wondering if I could get some opinions from the fellow moz users'

I have a website which I which to rank for the term 'evening dress'.As you can imagine it is a pretty difficult term with a score of 62% (the term gets 301,000 broad matches and 27,000 exact matches a month).

As much as I would like to target this term I feel that my domain is not strong enough (DA 39) to match the competition. Therefore, would a better strategy be to target long tail keywords which also contain the primary keyword, ie black evening dress evening dress hire cheap evening dress buy evening dress online please note that these were just examples, I haven't researched a comprehensive long tail list.

Would targeting these long tail keywords mean that a) I should be able to rank for them faster and thus receive more traffic, sooner, and b) build up links to the page which I ultimately want to rank for evening dresses with numerous backlinks containing the keyword evening dress.

The trade off with doing this is that I would need to seo one page for all the long tail keywords to gain the maximum benefit for the 'money' keyword.

Does this sound like a sensible approach to both ranking for big money term and also getting traffic sooner rather than later?

Thanks Carl

[BenFox]

You'll find that for a lot of the long tail keywords you will be targeting users will expect something different than they would if they had just typed "evening dresses". Whatever you do you'll need to remember that user experience is vital - after all what's the point in traffic if it doesn't convert?

I'd love to give more advice but I've never been in that situation before so I look forward to hearing what other people feedback.