It the site is written using a rich vocabulary then you should easily meet the goal of ranking well for 1000+ long tail phrases.

I would rather have 800 phrases bringing in one or two visitors a month than fight with the thousands of other sites all fighting for the 1000 visitors who are using the top phrases.

Most conversions come from the long tail queries as those are people who have not found what they wanted on the popular phrases and are now targeting their search. Hopefully they take action when they do find a match.

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