Long Tail SEO Process

Glenn Jimerson — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:43:35 +0000

When it comes to SEO everyone wants to rank in the top 10 for their keyword. As a Phoenix SEO that is the reason why people hire me. But what a lot of people are not familiar with is the value of key word phrases. Today’s search engine user is getting more and more sophisticated. Back in the early days people would type in their keyword and up would pop results but often those results did not return exactly what they are looking for. While most of the major search engines have been good about improving the results, users have learned to narrow their search by performing searches for phrases instead of individual words. For instance someone looking for “Cars” would get millions of results only some of which are actually useful. So to improve those results people perform more specific searches like “used cars” or “Honda used cars”. We in the SEO industry refer to hits for these phrases as the “long tail”.

Consumers are typing in these longer phrases and I’ll let you folks in on a little secret. Sometime the amount of traffic coming from long tail phrases is greater than the traffic from one strong keyword. I know it sounds crazy but looking at my personal sites and those of my clients I’ve seen this distinct patter emerge time after time. While one or two key words will get thousands of hits, these phrases may get 10 or 20 but there are hundreds of phrases contained in a site.

The long tail is your friend. For two distinct reasons. Number one: you are getting traffic and from my perspective all traffic is good. Number two: your visitors are getting a better search experience because they are more than likely to find exactly what they are looking for on your site. A happy targeted surfer is more likely to convert to a sale.

So should you be targeting log tail terms? Of course! When I plan a SEO campaign I’ll pop open a spread sheet and type all my key words in one column. In the next column I’ll put in all the modifiers i.e. the stuff that makes up the phrases. Going back to my previous example I’ll put “cars, automobile, and autos” in column one. In the next column I’ll put in “Honda, Toyota, and Chevy”. The the next column I’ll put in “New, used, and previously owned”. Now the fun part, mixing and matching. Start making phrases with all your words. Mix and match is the name of the game. When you’re done take your combinations and pop them into your favorite search engines. See if there is actually any competition for those phrases. Once you’ve done that use a tool like WordTracker or Overture’s free tool to see how often people actually search for those phrases. When you find a combination that has few competitors and a high number of searches you’ve got a winning phrase that should get you some nice long tail traffic.

Now that you’ve got your list of phrases make sure to incorporate them into your SEO friendly ad copy. Of course be smart and write it so a person can understand it not just what you think a Search Engine spider will like. I guarantee when you start consciously targeting the long-tail phrases you’ll get more target traffic to your site.

SEO Rodeo » Keyword Analysis

Long Tail SEO Process