Sunday, August 9, 2009

Gold In The Long Tail


I was always horrible in math, but always loved stats. Growing up I could figure a baseball players batting average in a heart beat and recite statistics from my favorite teams players at a drop of the hat. This has led to my love affair with web stats and Google analytics. Once you learn the ends and outs of it, it will tell you more than you can imagine about your site. I watch for where surfers come from and what links they exit on in particular and then match up items purchased on eBay that match terms of the exit link from the site. On my best well structured and content laden sites, the long tail search terms convert the best from the search engines. These surfers general use 4-7 keywords in their search from the engine, land on my site and exit through an eBay product link on the page. The longer the keyword the surfer uses, the higher the ratio of out-clicks to an eBay product.

Focusing on longer tail keywords is simple to implement into a relative content page. Just drill down in MNF, Google Keyword tool or whatever tool you are using and these will pop right out at you. Do not get caught up in the low search for count as you can integrate a lot of long tail phrases into one parent page of a shorter keyword focused targeted page. These low searched for terms add up the more you integrate them into your site and have a ton less competition as well. People tend to get too hung up on search numbers of primary keywords, that they neglect to pay any attention to adding longer tail phrases. The article will usually be only driven around a 2-3 word keyword phrase, thus leaving the big money surfer on the table. If you buy content from Need An Article or Text Broker, you may want to instruct the writer to integrate in a couple of the longer tail phrases you research out into the article. Remember while most of these writers are great writers, they are not SEO or keyword specialist. The article you might purchase might be great on the surface and actually solve a problem or need, but can truly gather more money from the table with longer tail phrases added.

If you have already purchased and posted your article, you can easily go in and weave in some long tail phrases into it without any problems. There is no penalty for improving your content on the page. You will be at the mercy of waiting for the search engines to re-index, but this normally only takes a few weeks at most.

If you are not using some sort of analytics program, I suggest you start. There are several out there besides Google as many have been lead to believe that the less you give Google the better. I am not one who wears a tin foil hat, but if you are, just use a different analytics. You will see that the big money is indeed in the long tail and will better learn how to attack it.

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2 comments:

JoJo on August 9, 2009 at 6:12 PM said...

That is pretty interesting about the relationships you noticed. You are right about using the analytic tools. Now that my blogs are established, I can spend more time looking at the numbers. I realize that sometimes my best stories are not getting any hits and some of the unexpected ones are getting tons of hits. It definitely helps you focus your traffic.

Alan Mitchell on August 9, 2009 at 11:11 PM said...

Completely agree that targeting long-tail searches can achieve significantly better results than chasing after the generic, short-tail searches.

I recently did some research on PPC searches containing different numbers of words (i.e. short, medium and long-tail searches), and came to similar conclusion to yourself: that en masse long-tails can deliver significant volume, and since they have less competition, it is much easier to rank higher on the first page. What's more, since people making long-tail searches are often further along in the buying cycle and are therefore more motivated to buy, conversion rates are often much higher. A well though-out long-tail strategy, can be extremely profitable, and is infinitely less frustrating that trying to achieve number 1 spot for that super generic keyword.

http://www.alanmitchell.com.au/techniques/benefits-of-long-tail-keywords/

Although the research was carried out with PPC in mind, the general principles still apply for SEO.

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