How to Optimise for Long-Tail Search Terms

Bookmark and Share

Written by Natasha Stone – 12.03.10

Post to Twitter
Tweet This

Long-Tail-Search-TermOptimising for Multiple Keywords and Long-Tail Search Terms

At the recent BrightonSEO event, Peter Handley from Vertical Leap made an interesting point that it’s often easy to overlook. When optimising our websites for search engines many of us will focus on ranking highly for one search term. This has often been the technique of black hat SEO too, with the method of embedding as many repeated search terms in a website as possible, often at the expense of quality.

Confused already? Com on our  SEO Training course or learn more about Social Media on our training courses.

But professional SEO Peter Handley has a different perspective:

Why using multiple key phrases works

“You can increase the traffic of a website far more effectively by increasing the number of phrases driving traffic to a website and they are much more likely to convert as a result” – Peter Handley

Read on to discover why you should use long-tail keywords and how you can find out how popular certain keywords are.

Why you should use long-tail keywords

Why would you use several keywords that may only each bring a small amount of traffic? Well the traffic of all of these grouped will add up, and you have a higher chance of ranking on Google’s first page with lesser known long-tail keywords.

A long-tail keyword is a three or four word phrase which is very specific to the service being searched for or sold. Optimising each post for low traffic, long-tail keywords (also known as “niche” or “narrow” search queries) is the tactic many SEOs are employing – a good idea in the increasingly competitive SEO world.

One SEO blog states that 75% of all searches are long-tail keywords.

You could competently use the phrase “Madrid holidays” throughout an article, only to find that you rank on the no man’s land of the second SERP. You may need to use a single popular keyword dozens of times within a short page to rank near Google’s #1 – which, without naming names, is the technique many low-quality content holiday websites opts for!

In contrast, using longer and less popular keywords could help maintain the quality of your content, and give you a greater chance of appearing high on search engines’ results pages. An example would be “guided tours of Madrid” rather than “Madrid holidays”. Or, it would be more beneficial for Silicon Beach Training to rank highly for “SEO training in Brighton” than just “SEO training”. Conversion will also be higher as visitors will be more likely to buy if you are selling the precise product they want! This blog elaborates on the main reasons to use long-tail keywords if you want to learn more.

So, how do you know which keywords to use?

How to find what people search for – most popular keywords

Most of the major search engines provide a way to view the most popular queries right now:

  • AOL Hot Searches, Ask IQ, Dogpile SearchSpy, Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends are all useful for this.
  • Google Trends is the most handy, allowing you to compare multiple search terms and to view the quantity of queries by language, city, region etc. However, it falls down when comparing long tail phrases as it doesn’t have enough data on many, e.g. nothing came up for “social media training”.
  • Google and Yahoo also offer their respective AdWords Keyword and Keyword Selector tools – designed for help advertisers but useful to anyone when gauging the best keywords to use.
  • Also check out dWoz Search Phrase Lists for a full list of search engine services.

Another way to decide on your keywords is to use Google’s predictive search feature. This will tell you how many results there are for various queries.

Google-search-prediction

Unfortunately Google only predicts search terms that follow what you’ve entered i.e. typing “social media” won’t find you results for “managing social media”. But it’s a handy tool and comparing numbers of results can help you decide which long-tail search terms to use.

Whatever you do, focus on no more than three search terms for any one page, and make sure your keyword density is below 5% – you can find out more about keyword density and placement at this blog.

Let us know how you get on! Also, are there any other methods of finding out keywords that you’ve used?

Similar posts you may like

  1. Optimise your Facebook Fanpage for Google
  2. Google inject search engine with Caffeine
  3. Good Search Engine Optimisation Practice
  4. Learn about Google Trends
  5. Google Personalised Search Results – How to turn them off

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share This Post

Bookmark and Share

This entry was posted by Natasha Stone on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 10:25 am and is filed under New Free Resources, SEO. 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.

8 Responses to “How to Optimise for Long-Tail Search Terms”

Peter Handley says:

Mercifully short video of me there!

Good post… As I said in the rest of my talk, we normally would specifically focus the optimisation of the websites we work on a core set of highly searched root phrases, but in doing so, find that the variations of longer tail traffic driven, ultimately:

a) drive as much, if not more traffic than the highly searched, competitive phrase

and b) due to the more specific nature of the query and the resulting answer of said query from the website that this traffic converts at a much higher level.

Most of the time I dont find we need to specifically target the long tail – if you are doing the SEO right in the first place by concentrating efforts on improving the websites rankings for those root phrases, it has a cascading effect on the number of keywords that Google and the other search engines make that site visible for.

12. 3. 2010 at 11:29 am

Natasha Stone says:

Thanks Pete – hope you didn’t mind us using the video!

12. 3. 2010 at 11:35 am

Peter Handley says:

nah, it’s fine… Vanity is not something that is in me though, so I did cringe quite a bit when watching it back! As I said, mercifully short! ;)

12. 3. 2010 at 11:38 am

Tim Tavender says:

Hi Natasha,

There is also a nice feature of Google Analytics that can reveal phrases that bought you traffic and what page they rank on. You need to set up a new profile and filters but it can be really insightful.
As Peter says when you work across the site properly the cascading effect can elevate longer tail keywords from deeper pages naturally.

12. 3. 2010 at 1:22 pm

uberVU - social comments says:

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by SBTTraining: @ismepete You’ve got the wrong URL there! Optimising for long-tail search terms – http://bit.ly/bzQyf6...

13. 3. 2010 at 8:42 pm

New SEO Training Course « Silicon Beach Training Blog says:

[...] principles across all your web activity. These include talking to your niche market, using specific long-tail keywords, regularly updating your website with relevant material, keeping current and monitoring your [...]

6. 4. 2010 at 12:21 pm

SEO vs Social Media Marketing « Silicon Beach Training Blog says:

[...] HTML coding to increase search engine exposure and creating or editing content to include niche long-tail keywords to raise the search engine ranking in less competitive areas and to attract specific traffic that [...]

9. 4. 2010 at 11:29 am

Why is no one reading my blog? 20 ways to get blog traffic and comments | Graham Jones - Internet Psychologist says:

[...] optimisation: I’ve covered long-tail SEO in greater length elsewhere; optimising a post for a long key phrase will attract more targeted [...]

1. 7. 2010 at 10:57 am

Leave a Reply

+44 (0)1273 622272

Follow Silicon Beach Training

Categories

Upcoming courses

See all course dates »

Home | Sitemap | Print |