Optimizing For Long Tail Keywords

Why this should be an important part of your SEO campaign?

When talking about the long tail keyword, many people dismiss optimizing your site for these phrases. The most commonly cited reason is that they simply don't have enough search volume.

Well, it's time to rethink that, and we're going to tell you why.

Recently we attended a niche SEO seminar, and one statistic really caught my attention. When looking at keywords in general, there are typically your "core" keywords, then the long tail keywords. The "core" keywords are your ultra competitive keywords and phrases. Additionally, these are the high volume keywords.

For the average niche, only 20% of all search volume comes from the top 10 "core" keywords, the other 80% of the traffic comes from the long tail keywords. That's the bulk of the available traffic, 80%. Why aren't we capturing that huge amount of traffic? Because we are overlooking the long tail keywords.

For many businesses and individuals, there is a budget for advertising, and for every business, there are other, bigger fish out there with a larger budget. Those budgets are invariably going after the top ten or "core" keywords in that particular niche. Everyone in your niche wants to rank well for the same keywords, making those core phrases ultra competitive. The more competitive your niche, the more work you will need to do, and the more money you will need to spend to rank well for these core terms.

Now I'm not saying you should abandon your high volume "core" keywords, but think about this. 75% of internet searchers do not leave the first page of the search results. So if you are not on the first page of Google for your term, 75% of searchers will never have a chance to see your site. If you're not on the second page, that 75% grows.

Instead of spending all of your efforts focusing on the large keyword phrases, spend some time going after the long tail phrases. These are phrases with less search volume, but also less competition. Ranking at the top of the search engines for "weather resistant red widget" will be much less time consuming than ranking for "widget".

Additionally, the modifiers that make these phrases "long tail" phrases actually will increase your conversion rates. If you are selling weather resistant red widgets, you may only get 20 people to your site for that term, as opposed to the higher volume you would get if you ranked well for "widget", but those 20 people will be highly qualified leads, and will convert at higher levels.

The sum of these long tail keyword phrases is massive, and ranking well very quickly is a huge benefit of going after this traffic. If you have not been going after the long tail keyword traffic, give it a try. Your conversions will likely be better, you will rank more quickly, and over time, you can drive a lot of traffic with this technique.

Keep an eye out for more helpful hints, tips and ideas to generate traffic and rank better in the search engines. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

Keyword Selection as an Internet Strategy

If you are starting your site from scratch, selecting keywords at this stage is a time and money saver. If you are redesigning your website, this is the time to outdo your previous mistakes.
Zeroing On the Right Keywords
If you are wondering what keyword has to do with website design think again. It determines whether your website architecture will have a folder or linear structure. If it is a folder structure then how many levels?

Let's take a hypothetical example. Suppose you are a company selling confections. You are designing an e-commerce website. You may have two or more options for website architecture.
Option 1: confectionary company displaying products by type e.g. cakes, candies, cookies, chocolates etc.
Option 2: confectionary company displaying products by occasions e.g. birthdays, weddings, thanksgiving, baby showers etc.
Option 3: This option is a tad expensive because it involves more complex programming at the database level. You can let the visitor decide how he or she wants to view the website product wise or occasion wise.

Which structure will be more appropriate?
Before deciding we need to find the online search behavior of our future customers. Using a keyword tool we find out that the search phrases customers use to find the ' cakes' are for specific types of cakes like wedding cakes, birthday cakes, diaper cakes and so on. Same stand true for candy.
Naturally the second option is a better website architecture structure. It can grow both laterally and longitudinally. It's more suitable for search patterns hence later it will be easier to optimize.

The best way to do a keyword search is to write down the phrases that describe your website's purpose. Start with:
5 one-word phrases
10 two-word phrases
5 three-word phrases
Run them in a keyword tool. You will be amazed at the results.
Save them in a spreadsheet.

Selecting the Right Keywords:

Your spreadsheet probably has a thousand keywords. It's best to have a base keyword in mind around which your site will evolve. Keep these in mind before you start selection.

One word phrases are the hardest to rank for because they require a high number of backlinks which is difficult for a new site.

Their conversions are also the worst because people are not searching for that product or information. They realize it as soon as they type it and see 44 million websites for 'cakes'.

Two phrase keywords are good to optimize for as they have more searches and hence more conversions. But they are difficult to do so especially for a new website.
Three phrase keywords may be few but are relatively easy to optimize for. It's best to start with three word keywords.

Select the 3 word phrases most suitable for your site. Make them top priority for now...But do not ignore the 2 phrase or single word keywords. With time you will be able to drive traffic to your website using these keywords too and they most probably will have more search traffic.

The other factors that matter are:

The number of competing sites
The strength of those competing sites
Select a long string for 3 word phrases whose searches rank more than 5 per day. This is the starting list for keywords for your site. Repeat the same procedure for two word phrases.

At this stage it may be suitable for you to leave out 1 word phrases not in the website design but in the optimization process..

Integrating the Keywords in your Website Design
All efforts at selection are useless if keywords are not properly integrated in design.

2 tips before starting:

Do not optimize for more than 3 keywords on one page
Preferably optimize for related keywords Example:
Virtual Offices in Irvine Orange County (keyword)
-Virtual Offices
-Virtual Offices Irvine
-Virtual Offices Orange County

Get your website designer to use these search phrases in the page in Title tags, Keyword tags, Header tags and Alt tags. While writing the content for the page make sure you use the phrase at least twice in 350 words of content. Use synonyms of the keywords.