At first, keyword selection is a balancing act. You want to find a niche, but not one so obscure it won’t generate leads. Good keyword research and a thorough understanding of the standard terms used in the client’s industry provide a good start, but even if you do a great job out the gate, you always look forward to new analytics to help you refine your strategy. Long tail keywords are one of the first steps in a maturing plan.For example, look at Wild Birds Choice (http://www.wildbirdschoice.com). They’re a client of ours. I’m going to tell you exactly what I did to explore long tail keywords, step by step.

Step 1 - Analytics: Naturally, the first thing we did was examine fresh analytics for keyword composition. I filtered out the lowest performers and obvious “noise” terms, leaving me with a whole bunch of low level but meaningful results. Sure, they weren’t as great as our primary keywords, but that’s why they’re “long tail.” Individually they’re weak, but their aggregate effect is nothing to sneeze at. Long tail strategies are successful because they mix of keyword quantity (lots of terms) and persistence (low level activity that never really tapers off).

Step 2 - SERP Examination: Next, I had to see how these keywords already performed for Wild Birds Choice’s search rankings. If they’re ranking highly, that’s great - but each word is still low volume, which means you can’t give yourself a pat on the back. The benefit is that long tail keywords are all about genuine organic response. Their SERP either comes from non-optimized human interest or easy to spot, keyword stuffed fake pages, so it’s easy to tell how sincere the results are, page by page.

For optimization purposes, the best keywords are usually found toward the end of page 1 or on pages 2-3. This indicates real interest, but that the keywords aren’t played out. If the company’s #1 and getting long tail results from the keyword, we can’t improve that much — their current results already indicate the maximum interest level. We want room to grow! SERP composition counts, too. If there’s an obvious high-volume leader, the keyword is more competitive than our analytics might indicate.

Step 3 - Redesign Target Pages: Useful long tail keywords often reflect more specific search targets. These searchers want one key product or chunk of information. We want to give it to them, so we link these terms to relevant pages. Here are two examples from Wild Birds Choice.

• I changed a product page’s name and text keywords from its brand (Gold Nyjer Seed) to Nyjer Thistle Seed. That’s what it is, and that’s what people are looking for.
• The Attracting Wild Birds page used to be called “Attracting Birds,” but I changed it to match a more tightly targeted, proven long tail keyword.

Step 4 – Global Redesign: To top it all off, I edited the whole site to give its menu keyword-relevant links to target pages (like “Attracting Wild Birds”) and added a navigational footer with the same thing.

These and other adjustments are designed to harvest long tail keywords singly and collectively, reflecting the overall aim of a strategy that uses them: to promote combined, persistent activity instead of the major campaigns we’d mount for lead keywords. Of course, we don’t ignore the leaders either. It’s a multifaceted plan with a common goal: improve the client’s traffic, conversions and success.

Tags: functional web design, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, sem, seo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.