All hail long tail

February 21st, 2007

Everyone knows that putting all your eggs in one basket is a risky business. One mistake or change and your whole business is gone. Its the same case with search. Clients always come to us with a definitive list of key words and terms that they want to be first for. Its usually one or two big terms that they assume are going to bring in the majority of their traffic. This, however is not always the case.

A company we have just started working with, lockwoodhume office furniture sell office desks, chairs and other furniture. Their main key term “office furniture” for example is quite a competitive term which may take time to rank for. To stop putting all their eggs in one basket what is the alternative? Long tail.

In the short term long tail terms are going to produce much quicker results than the main terms and even though you may only get a couple of visits per day, per term, you may have hundreds or even thousands of niche long tail terms you can rank for. In some cases this can account for 50% or more of a websites traffic!

Another example that we are just starting to work for is Travelcover travel insurance. Their main term is going to be “Travel insurance” which is a very highly competitive key term and will take a long time to start ranking well for. In this case long tail terms are going to be essential to get the site ranked and start building traffic and natural links.

Here are some excellent tools to find long tail terms:

www.hittail.com
Excellent long tail suggestion service based on incoming query searches and related terms.

Google keyword selector
The old classic! Use Google’s own tool to find long tail search volumes and competitiveness for your given terms

Google Analytics
If you haven’t already got an analytics account - GET ONE! With huge amounts of information about search terms and a recommended search terms it is an essential tool for any website.