In our last blog post we mentioned that we're going to do a series of blog posts by our talented team members on specific topics. This is the second post on SEO by our Director, Christopher Mills.
In light of our last blog post about SEO in 2012 and what to expect in 2013, we decided to focus on something related to content marketing and give you something to think about and/or apply to your strategies.
Over the years there have been thousands of articles stating why blogging, content marketing and content production is important, from establishing a brand to showing off your expertise, but one topic that hasn't been covered in depth in a non-technical manner, is that of long-tail keywords. What's that you might ask? A long-tail keyword is a phrase that someone searches for in Google that consists of more than a couple of words and is a specific search, here's an example:
In the example above, a person is searching for a very specific phrase, a phrase that usually wouldn't be the primary focus of a car rental company. Typically, a car rental company would optimize their website for terms such as "car rental", "car hire", "car hire cape town" or "car rental cape town". These terms are far more competitive, meaning that the company would need to do a great deal of work to rank highly for them and that the person searching would have many more choices in the search results. On the other side, with a long-tail search, competition would be less and there would be fewer results, thus giving the company more chance of acquiring the searcher as a potential customer.
In such a case, the car rental company would need to find a way to incorporate these long-tail keywords into their strategy. The easiest way would be to write articles (or blog posts) on their website addressing these long-tail topics. The technical term of for is content strategy. By writing articles on these topics, the company stands a good chance of ranking in the search results for the long-tail keywords. Now, that's not to say that someone could simply write an article on the topic of hiring a car in Cape Town near the airport and expect to rank right at the top. The process of content strategy and content marketing is far more involved, questions such as the following would need to be raised:
The sweet spot (as circled in green) shows a good mix between budget, competition level and search frequency - this is where we want to invest time and energy.
Bonus Section
If you're familiar and would like to run some tests and/or comparisons between long-tail and short-tail phrases that are bringing visitors to your website, you can do so by creating some advanced segments in Google Analytics. The regular expression to be used for long-tail keywords is as follows: (s|+).*(s|+).*(s|+) and may be implemented as follows and tested against organic traffic or actual conversions.
On the other hand, if you want to pull a report that lists all the short-tail keywords, simply repeat the above and change the "Include" to "Exclude" like so:
Whilst producing content for your website, you need to measure everything to determine the return on investment. If you're not measuring, you'll never know whether your spend on content marketing is worth while.
In the example above, a person is searching for a very specific phrase, a phrase that usually wouldn't be the primary focus of a car rental company. Typically, a car rental company would optimize their website for terms such as "car rental", "car hire", "car hire cape town" or "car rental cape town". These terms are far more competitive, meaning that the company would need to do a great deal of work to rank highly for them and that the person searching would have many more choices in the search results. On the other side, with a long-tail search, competition would be less and there would be fewer results, thus giving the company more chance of acquiring the searcher as a potential customer.
In such a case, the car rental company would need to find a way to incorporate these long-tail keywords into their strategy. The easiest way would be to write articles (or blog posts) on their website addressing these long-tail topics. The technical term of for is content strategy. By writing articles on these topics, the company stands a good chance of ranking in the search results for the long-tail keywords. Now, that's not to say that someone could simply write an article on the topic of hiring a car in Cape Town near the airport and expect to rank right at the top. The process of content strategy and content marketing is far more involved, questions such as the following would need to be raised:
- How competitive is the long-tail keyword really?
- How can the article be written in a manner that is useful?
- How long should the article be?
- How do you discover long-tail keywords that are worth going after?
- 1-word searches = 20.29% (19.02% previously)
- 2-word searches = 23.65% (32.58% previously)
- 3-word searches = 21.92% (25.61% previously)
- 4-word searches = 14.89% (12.83% previously)
- 5-word searches = 8.68% (5.64% previously)
- 6-word searches = 4.65% (2.32% previously)
- 7-word searches = 2.49% (0.98% previously)
- 8-word searches = 3.43% (0% previously)
The sweet spot (as circled in green) shows a good mix between budget, competition level and search frequency - this is where we want to invest time and energy.
Bonus Section
If you're familiar and would like to run some tests and/or comparisons between long-tail and short-tail phrases that are bringing visitors to your website, you can do so by creating some advanced segments in Google Analytics. The regular expression to be used for long-tail keywords is as follows: (s|+).*(s|+).*(s|+) and may be implemented as follows and tested against organic traffic or actual conversions.
On the other hand, if you want to pull a report that lists all the short-tail keywords, simply repeat the above and change the "Include" to "Exclude" like so:
Whilst producing content for your website, you need to measure everything to determine the return on investment. If you're not measuring, you'll never know whether your spend on content marketing is worth while.
6 comments
Blair H
January 21, 2013 at 1:13 pmThat’s a very good point, so setting up your long tail keywords will beneficent you in the long run really once web users start cottoning onto the idea of doing more search specific keywords. That way you should be at the top of the SERPs when the rest of the webmasters and so on start competing right?
Also a plus side for long tail keywords is that you can also rank for the other keyword combos in you long tail keyword or am i wrong in assuming this.
Awesome bit of info by the way. Im going to go put some of this into practice and see what bounces back.
Christopher Mills
January 21, 2013 at 5:51 pmHi Blair, cheers for popping in and leaving your thoughts! The concept works along these lines for me: Most companies have some head terms (short and highly competitive keywords) which take a while to get indexed and ranked well for, so in the time being, searching for long tail phrases which are less competitive gives a company the ability to rank easier and far quicker, which means immediate traffic. This takes places over 3-6months whilst you work on the more competitive head terms.
The most ideal way to execute this is through content generation on a news area or a blog, because long tail is more fitting, whereas the primary and most important pages on the website should focus on the more competitive head terms.
Please give it a try and report back with your findings.
Blair H
January 21, 2013 at 9:28 pmMakes sense
“searching for long tail phrases which are less competitive gives a company the ability to rank easier and far quicker, which means immediate traffic.”
This is then a very important factor for new website owners to think about.
Iv implemented 2 articles in an affiliate driven website both articles focus on a specific gaming niche, looking forward to seeing which blog entry brings the most traffic the quickest 🙂
PS the website is still very fresh so should be a good test subject (2months old and pulling some nice traffic organically)
Will show you some stats in a month or so on the test subject, 😉
Christopher Mills
January 21, 2013 at 11:27 pmAn important thing to remember here is that long tail traffic wouldn’t bring as much as short tail traffic, so you can’t expect a great deal of traffic, but what you will find is that the traffic is brings is very much targeted and therefore bounce rates should be low, and essentially conversions high.
It would be fantastic to see how this plays out on a new site, looking forward to hearing about it!
Blair H
January 22, 2013 at 9:07 amThat’s actually what i was thinking last night in bed. Long Tail keywords would allow for more target specific traffic which would be great for most Niche websites. Like you said conversions would also then be a lot higher, so surely it make sense to have a 60-40(Long-Short) ratio with long tail keywords if you were trying to capture a certain audience or am i going slightly of the beaten path here Chris?
Christopher Mills
January 22, 2013 at 9:18 amBecause each niche is different, a ratio is a hard one because it depends on the potential traffic for head terms vs long tail phrases. Googles keyword traffic estimator (or AdWords estimator) isn’t completely accurate, but you could enter in the head terms for your niche and get a potential click/impression count and then repeat the process with a list of long tail phrases, and that might give you an idea on ratio – it won’t be completely accurate, but it’ll at least paint a picture of how much content production you need to do around long tail. You’re thinking definitely makes sense though, and I agree. I think it also depends on how much content you can actually product in the allocated time, whilst still performing all the practises around optimizing for the head terms..