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Targetting Long Tail Keywords in Your SEO Campaign
Definition of the Long Tail
Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine coined the expression 'the Long Tail'. His example was how Amazon.com makes most of its revenue from huge numbers of specialised titles, not the blockbuster, high-selling books. Each specialised title may only sell hundreds of copies per year, but there are just so many of them, compared with the small number of 'top ten' books.
The Long Tail is a term which describes the strategy of optimising for a large number of unique search terms, although each individual term may only be search for a few times per month. Long tail is a by product of how user's actually search, we'll cover an example below.
The long tail of search is often forgotten, or neglected because it is thought that its a waste to optimise for search terms which only attract 3 searches per month as opposed to optimising for terms which attract thousands of searchs.
However, your long tail keywords can bring in more than 50% of your search traffic and they're far easier to rank well for. According to some studies they are also far more profitable because user searching for these terms are more ready to purchase.
Lets take a look at an example.
Long Tail SEO Keywords
The long tail SEO keywords may generate more traffic than your top keywords when you combine all of the individual searches.
As an example, lets assume you sell cars. The term car(s) will be a massively searched for term. This term would be extremely hard to rank well for as there is a ton of competition. The word cars could be represented by in the graph by column 1 above. In this example, it would bring in just over 400 visitors. But many people who are ready to make a purchase would be typing in more specific terms. For instance, someone wanting to buy leather car seats would probably type in something like "Leather car seats for a Mazda 323". Someone wanting to get their car repainted might type "Where can I get my VW Seat resprayed". These searches would appear to the right on the graph above. These terms are not searched for in the same amounts as your sites keywords, but adding all of the searches from long tail keywords can be much more than the searches from your main keywords. These people know what they are looking for and are therefore much more likely to actually make a purchase.
One way of thinking about it is to think of long tail as "optimising for the thousands of low traffic search terms, rather than for the low number of high traffic search terms".
Why would you focus on long tail keywords?
Knowing that the long tail SEO keywords won't individually bring in thousands of keywords, why would you want to focus on them? Well, as already mentioned, they really are far easier to rank well for. Also, people searching for these terms more than likely have their credit cards in their hands ready to make a purchase, and, combining all the searches from these phrases may be more than 50% of your total searches.
Where can you get these long tail keywords?
Unique Content - In order to rank for these long tail search terms, you actually have to include them in your site. Add new pages to your site on a regular basis, and try to use natural language. This is how your users would be searching. Try to make a web page for each major search terms, and then just talk naturally about the subject. For instance, in our cars example above, if you sold car radios, you might set up a page just for car radios. Better still would be to set up different pages for different car radios, so maybe one for the Brand A radio, and another for the Brand B radio.
My Favourite technique for getting long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are really tough to actually determine before hand. This is because thousands upon thousands of users will type in phrases in their own unique way, sometimes even with spelling mistakes. So, my favourite technique for getting these long tail keywords is to let the users enter them directly. How, I hear you ask. Simple. Set your pages up to allow user comments.
As an example, at our free CMS system's website, easyCMSlite, we are targeting the keyphrase "Content management system". Allowing users to enter comments, a user might enter a comment like "I downloaded this content manigement system and it just works". Any user going to google and typing in "where can I download a content manigement system which works", will match with that long tail keyword. This is not a search phrase we could think of ourselves, particularly because the work management is spelled incorrectly (manigement). Allowing users to enter comments mean you will be getting targeted long tail search terms exactly as your users would be searching for.
How to allow user comments on your pages
Why not check out easyCMSlite, the free, easy CMS. It will allow you to setup your site quickly and easily. You can setup your new pages for specific products and you can easily allow and manage user comments on a per page basis.
Alternatively, if you already have a website and would like to allow user comments in it, take a look at our Comment Plugin which will allow you to setup user comments on your web page without needing to know programming. Link: PWH Comments
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