Long Tail Keywords the devil is in the long tail
When optimising your website content, targeting your industry’s big keywords and keyphrases (‘vanity phrases’) is common practice. We can help you with that. However, competing for these big keywords alone can not only get really expensive due to the massive scrum of competition, but it’s also no longer particularly effective.
Want to catch the customers your competitors are ignoring?
- Long tail keywords attract far more traffic
- Compete with the big players in your market - and beat them!
- Target the masses of phrases your competitors are missing
- Get found by people who are ready to buy
So why is targeting vanity keyword phrases alone an ineffective strategy?
Because the amount of traffic yielded by a purely vanity phrase-driven SEO strategy really isn’t that great at all. How do we know that?
- Research conducted by the leading internet intelligence agency Hitwise shows that the top 1000 most searched keywords only account for 10.6% of all searching.
- Our own clients analytics backs this up. Our most successful sites have well developed long-tails, with the headline keywords accounting for much less than 10% of the traffic, and an even smaller percentage of the conversions. More on that later.
The ever-dwindling dividends of fighting to compete for the big keywords in any industry are vastly disproportionate to the sheer level of time and investment needed. Bearing this in mind, common sense dictates that an effective SEO strategy should also look to the masses of long tail keywords in its quest to attract high quality traffic to a website. As ever, common sense rings true – ignore the long tail at your peril.
Long Tail Keywords - Introducing LTaS – The WebMarketing Group’s unique tool
We’ve learned at first hand just how vital long tail keywords are for effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). What we’ve discovered in our own day-to-day SEO work confirms exactly what the likes of Hitwise have been suggesting for some time – that long tail keywords are by far the biggest drivers of traffic to websites. In fact, a SEO strategy that ignores long tail keywords is one that ignores nearly 90% of a website’s potential traffic. That’s quite an oversight.
The good news is that changing your website content to include these critical long tail keywords is pretty simple in principle. The hard bit is coming up with the keywords that are going to work best for your website, and guesswork can quickly take you off on an expensive and ineffective tangent. This is where we come in - LTaS can find your long tail keywords.
Click here to ask us how LTaS can benefit your business.
First things first - what exactly are long tail keywords?
Long tail keywords are pretty much exactly as they sound – longer queries containing several keywords related to your products or services. As an example, if you sell car insurance for people over 50 on your website, then the obvious queries for your industry might be ‘car insurance’ or ‘over 50s car insurance’. These are great to have in your content, but the competition for them is mind-blowing, and your chances of ranking high any time soon are slim to none.
However, if you focus on long tail keywords, like ‘buy cheap over fifties car insurance’, then you’re likely to rank well straight away if some users conduct searches using that term – which they will do. Distribute a range of similar, well researched long tail keywords to this throughout your website content, and you’ll start to siphon off a whole world of users that some of the big boys who rank high for just the vanity phrases will never attract.
LTaS – the proven long tail phrase tool
Our existing clients have been enjoying the benefits of LTaS for several months now, receiving significant increases in high quality traffic to their websites. Read our testimonials
here.
Below is an absolutely typical set of analytics from a very successful client of ours. Apart from the healthy increase in traffic, notice how the site achieved rankings for over 100,000 different keywords over the 9 month period. This client is in retail footwear. You wouldn’t think there were that many ways of searching for shoes would you?
So how does LTaS work?
LTaS is based around a unique algorithm we’ve developed here at The WebMarketing Group. It uses web analytics tools to scrutinise a wide range of keywords and related phrases within the target industry/market and then assigns a difficulty score to them based on criteria calculated by the algorithm. Once this score has been established, our SEO consultants then look at the domain and the overall profile of the website in question and make highly informed decisions as to which of the suggested phrases will generate traffic for the site through high rankings in organic search engine listings. The final stage of the process happens when the SEO consultants pass the strongest long tail keywords to our in-house SEO copywriters, who blend them into content to be featured on the website.
A tactical approach to long tail keyword selection
LTaS does several very clever things:
1. Keyword identification
- Pulls down from Google a complete list of all the first-level long-tail keywords in your market place. Understanding exactly what people search for is the critical first step.
- Establishes the monthly search volumes for those keywords. The passing-trade, if you like, on each potential search ‘high street’. Data that the engines only made available recently.
- Calculates the ‘value’ of each keyword using the pay-per-click cost. Assuming that the current monthly ppc spend on any given search query reflects the value of that query to its bidders.
2. Competition
- This is where our exclusive new algorithm kicks in to show you how ‘difficult’ each keyword is. Our long-tail difficulty ‘algo’ actually goes into the search engines and assesses the current top-10 for various parameters to assign a difficulty score for that phrase.
3. Current rankings
What all of this gives us is a unique tactical map of a marketplace and where the clients’ website stands in it, allowing us to set out a detailed plan based on keywords which have the following characteristics:
- Good search volumes
- Relevancy to the clients’ business
- High PPC value in the marketplace
- Lower than expected difficulty
- Expectation of high conversion rates
- Expectation of faster rankings
Click here to ask us how LTaS can drive business through your website.
Improved conversion rates
So we know for a fact that a long tail strategy is absolutely critical for SEO, but what do we know about the nature of the long tail beast and how it behaves? A lot, actually. For instance, we know that users lengthen the phrases they type into the likes of Google as they refine searches the closer they get to buying/registering.
This is really significant, because it’s more fuel for the long tail fire, telling us in no uncertain terms that longer, more specific phrases will generate high quality traffic and by nature carry much reduced competition compared to vanity phrases. It’s not uncommon for 6, 7 or 8 word phrases to have an incredibly high conversion rate – how many sites out there do you think optimise content to this extent? We can tell you that it’s not many. But they will soon, so you need to steal a march on your competition.
Long tail phrases bypass domain authority
Another really important thing we know about long tail phrases is that search engines rank them based on their actual keyword content and not much else. This is good news, and it’s in stark contrast to how they rank sites for an industry’s main keywords or phrases, such as ‘car insurance’ or ‘credit cards’.
To elaborate, when deciding on how to rank websites using these big industry ‘buzz phrases’, Google, Yahoo! and MSN not only look at content but they also take into account the ‘authority’ of the website on which the phrases are featured, which is based on off page factors like how well established the site is and how many other sites link to it. This is one of the reasons why the main players always seem to appear at the top of the rankings for these big, all-encompassing phrases, even though their website content might not appear as well optimised as some of the sites further down the rankings. Off page factors win the day for the big sites when it comes ranking high for the big phrases.
So the significance for small and medium businesses of the search engines’ keyword-orientated method of ranking the much more effective long tail phrases is huge. It means that competing on long tail phrases is much more of a level playing field, allowing even the smallest websites to outmanoeuvre their gargantuan rivals. The long tail is power to SMEs.
LTaS – total content optimisation.
Click here to talk to us.
Long tail keyword SEO versus Traditional SEO
So how does this strategy differ from what we’ve all been doing in the past?
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Long tail strategy SEO
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Traditional SEO
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Phrase example
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“Buy cheap over fifties car insurance”
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“Car Insurance”
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Competition
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Low
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Very high and growing
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Basis of ranking
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Keyword and text parameters (easier)
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Domain authority, age and link profile (hard)
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Speed of ranking
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Months
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Years
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Conversion rate
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High
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Low
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Naturalness of link profile
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Very natural – lots of variety in anchor text
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Unnatural bias towards one or two phrases
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Naturalness of content
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Lots of synonyms and a well targeted word-cloud
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Spammy irrelevant text, overused phrases
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Depth
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Deep links and well distributed content
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Everything focussed on the homepage
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From this you’ll see that not only can long tail phrases dramatically increase your chances of reaching a much wider audience, but by nature these phrases also foster a much higher quality of website content - content that’s infinitely more readable and informative than the type centred around one or two incredibly limiting phrases.The long tail boasts quality AND quantity.
Stop press! Google has just changed - now long tail queries are more important than ever before
Forgetting about the critical off page SEO methods for a moment and talking purely in terms of website content optimisation - gone are the days of Google simply looking for relevance based on keywords alone. As of March 2009 Google has started to understand the actual meaning of words and phrases, introducing a level of intelligence to the algorithm that enables it to look for more sophisticated related words and phrases than it was previously able to. That’s a huge leap forward.
This evolution into the age of enhanced relevance-seeking is known as ‘semantics’ and it’s only going to grow in significance as Google becomes smarter and smarter. The implications for content of this progression towards a semantic web are huge, with the stock value of long tail as a SEO concept in particular rising by the day. Develop a long tail SEO strategy today and put yourself ahead of the competition.
Still not convinced?
Here is a word-cloud pictogram of how the search engines see this page!
It really works. After all, you found this page didn’t you?
Long tail is the future. Future-proof your website with LTaS.
Increase your sales with long tail content –
Click here to talk to us about LTaS.