Mining the Long Tail

Less frequently searched keywords are referred to as “long tail” keywords. They are worth going after if you are in a highly competitive niche, where getting top positions for high demand keywords is difficult or impractical. Long tail keywords are less often searched, but they are also almost invariably far less competitive. So the mere presence of them on a page will get traffic to them.

Long tail keywords are rarely words that you need to aggressively research. Rather, they are phrases that will naturally occur from good quality writing. Many of them cannot be accurately predicted, no matter how much research you do, because they are the keywords that have a larger degree of randomness to them.

There are three basic strategies to getting good long tail traffic results:

1. Good product or service descriptions. The descriptions you give to specific products or services are hugely important. Well-written, descriptive, and evocative explanations will enhance your SEO results, AND be more persuasive to your site visitors.

2. Good additional content pages. Adding well chosen, topically focused content pages to your website can enhance the ability your site has to draw visitors who are interested in what you have. This is partially an indirect approach - many will be there for the information only. Others will be drawn into the rest of your site and will convert to clients or customers. The key to this one is well-chosen, and well-written topic pages.

3. Additional websites or pages. This may be an infosite, a blog, a Squidoo or MySpace page (though those pages may be given less weight by search engines than a full website or blog), or any other additional, independent web presence. Other sites should be topically focused, and again, the key is good topic choice, and well-written content. Other websites can allow you to focus on one aspect of your business scope, and to draw in people in a “neutral” way. When you present information separate from your service or product site, it has higher credibility in the eyes of the reader. Forget doing this if you don’t intend to do it right. Shortcut sites will be ignored by search engines. They’ve got to be good quality, and to add to the substance of the web.

We have used all three of these tactics successfully with our clients. The tactic we choose has to do with how their business is set up, and what they are most easily able to sustain. We have also used them with our own business, and continue to do so. About 1/3 of the contacts that come to us from the web, come from one or another of our websites that is not our primary service website. Another significant number come from searches that lead to pages on our site that were not sales pages.

Start with high quality content. Well-written descriptions and explanations which draw people into the page. They’ll draw from search engines and they’ll invite again once they get to the page. Writing this kind of content is an art, and the effect of it is powerful enough to be worth paying for. Well written content, with well optimized pages is an unbeatable combination, while all the optimization and promotion in the world cannot make up for the lack of good content.

It is worth mining the long tail, especially if you are a microbusiness who is up against powerful competition that can outgun you on the optimization front - not that you should not optimize for the high demand keywords, you SHOULD. But you should also use the long tail “backdoor” tactic to gain the edge. Each long tail keyword has little power within itself. But combined, they can add up to a huge market share. Enough to make a small business very prosperous.