There are two very important things in SEO – links and content. You can never have enough of either. Adding additional content when you already have thousands of product pages might seem like a waste of time so I wanted to show you a good way to evaluate the long tail opportunity in your niche before allocating time & money to content writing.
The best way to look at the long tail is via AdWords because you can broad match and phrase match your target keywords and quickly gain data across the thousands of long tail keywords that trigger your adverts. In the past it’s been quite hard to gain anything useful from this data because Google Analytics only displays the trigger keyword rather than the actual search term. It was possible to install a filter but I doubt many people actually did.
However thanks to the all new Google AdWords interface you can see the exact keywords people are searching for combined with click through rates and cost per conversions right inside AdWords – simply click the button and the data is displayed for your selected ad group.
The way we use the data is to look at the long tail keywords that are getting the most traffic and figure out whether it’s better to build them into your current pages or create brand new pages to target those keywords directly. For informational queries and “how to” queries we recommend a brand new page while modifiers such as “buy” or “cheap” can normally be worked into an existing article.
Long tail traffic is by far the best way of getting more sales and using this method you can identify the keywords far easier than by using keyword tools.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
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I should probably note that if you use something like Omniture or Coremetrics then this data has always been available but not to the masses.
More comments from Patrick AltoftAll sounds relatively straight forward and makes utilising the oportunities of the long tail more effective. We all want great copy on our sites but what is the point if you cannot get the traffic or the ranking. Use the keywords and your efforts should be rewarded – simple really.
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Hey thanks for the post, that information is going to be really useful to know, i can see how long tail would translate to a higher conversion rate, but then the only problem is the number of clicks really niche long tails would generate in itself?
More comments from LuciPatrick,
great stuff – as usual.
is there any way to get info on the keywords that triggered impressions but no clicks ?
In your example above you have 421 Clicks with 26,364 Impressions. Knowing more about the `no click` Impressions would allow you to either lower the number by using negative keywords or identify keywords where your ad copy did not entice the prospect. either way useful info – no ?
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Nice post, thanks for sharing the resourceful info here.
More comments from tag44Hi! This is really one kind of long tail opportunity for me,I appreciate this post very much the creativity which I found its just superb.Just think about the protection and out innovative technologies,anyway nice and attractive post.Keep up post continue and stay tune with us.Thanks a lot……………………………………………..:)
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