Optimizing for the Long Tail

Posted by Upright Team

The long tail effect is what happens when your site starts ranking for a ton of keyword terms that you didn’t really focus on optimizing for. What’s cool about the long tail is that it can account for half or more of your traffic from the search engines. That’s right – 50% or more of your total traffic can come from keywords that you never even tried to rank for. Wow… kind of makes you stop worrying so much about that one ranking for that one keyword, huh?

What makes the long tail effect even more exciting is the fact that in many cases, the keywords that make up the long tail are more targeted and specific terms. And unless you live under a rock, you know that targeted traffic converts better. If you still don’t get it, let’s break it down like this: targeted traffic = conversions = money. Raise your hand if you don’t want to make more money. Hmm… no hands. Thought so.

So it makes total sense that if you optimize for the long tail as well – and don’t just spend your time focusing on one or two keywords as the traffic source for your site – you have the potential to see a 50% swing in traffic. If you’re skeptical as to the long tail effect and how it applies to your site, look at your stats. If you’re an Upright client, then you probably have Insite Metrics. Check out the list of keywords that bring traffic to your site. You’ll probably see a small group of keywords with big numbers and then a huge list of keywords with just a couple clicks here and there. But add up all those one or two visit keywords and you will see the long tail effect in action. In many cases, the long tail makes up half or more of your total search engine traffic.

Optimizing for the long tail is something that every good SEO should already be doing. Sure, you have your list of priority keywords – the ones that you really want to rank for. These are the keywords that get tons of traffic and describe the main goods or services that you offer. But you can’t ignore all the other keywords that can bring additional traffic. By building quality content that thoroughly discusses your themes and all the aspects of it, you should naturally be using terminology and phrases that are related to your theme. These are some of the additional keywords that you can rank for. If you optimize your site correctly, this ensures that all the content of your site can be read and indexed and has the best chance of ranking when someone queries one of the phrases that appears in that content. If you have an e-commerce site, don’t neglect optimizing the shopping cart pages as well. You will gain some great targeted traffic that is ready to convert (make a purchase) because they are looking for the specific product you sell.

Here are some tips on how to optimize your web site for the long tail:

Use different permutations and combinations of your keyword phrases in your copy. Speak naturally about your subject using various phrases that a searcher might use.
Use keyword suggestion tools to find variations of your keywords that you might not have considered optimizing for yet, and then choose a few more to optimize for. Keep building on your sites content by choosing additional keywords to focus pages on and you will not only improve the overall theme support, but you will create additional rankings for these focused terms.
Look at common words used on your competitors sites and be sure to use them on your site if applicable. This not only shows that you are within the same theme as these other sites, but gives you the opportunity to rank for those additional keywords as well.
If you have an e-commerce site, be sure to use descriptive keywords on the product pages in the title tag, meta tags, heading (H1, H2, etc.), description of the product in the body copy, text links to that page from other pages of your site, etc.

It’s important to realize that a good SEO program doesn’t just stop at getting ranked for a list of 10 or 15 keywords. And with the level of sophisticated optimization that we do for a site, we help our clients rank better for that long tail so that they can increase their traffic. If the long tail accounts for 50% or more of traffic, then that means it could potentially increase your sales and leads by 50%. And who doesn’t want to double their potential sales? Show of hands? Yup… thought so. Now go make that money!