Go Long - The Importance Of Longtail SEO

SEO is becoming harder.

More and more content is added to the web everyday - most of which will be indexed and ranked (sooner or later) for specific terms.

More and more advertisers are increasing their investment in SEO - more and more competing for specific phrases in the SERPs.

To rephrase the first line - success in SEO is getting harder.

Longtail SEO - The Answer?

Longtail SEO provides a solution to the short-tail challenges presented to small businesses (this is not to say that Longtail SEO is a practice that only small businesses can benefit from - although it is easier for the large advertisers to be competitive on generic, broad terms).

What is Longtail SEO?

Longtail by definition is a classification of search query which is 3 or more words. The phrases are very specific any as such tend to drive a more qualified user - the user is specifically searching for what they want. They are closer to the purchase stage, rather than at the initial research stage (dependant of course on what the actual term is!).

Although longtail traffic tends to be low (when compared to similar generic terms), optimising for a large volume of longtail traffic can actually pay dividends.

Why Do Small Businesses Need Longtail SEO?

As mentioned previously, SEO is becoming tougher and it is becoming harder for new sites or unestablished sites to rank for generic competitive terms.

7 years ago - it was easier to dominate the SERPs for generic terms. However, the sheer volume of content on the web now means it is alot harder. We found an interesting tool that looks at the volume of results pages for certain terms in 2001 and 2008. Although the tool was designed to highlight the emergence of Web 2.0 companies such as Digg and You Tube, terms such as Laptop show interesting results.

A site wishing to rank for the term ‘laptop‘ in 2001 ‘only’ had 1.4million other pages to compete against. Today it has over 205million! The term Notebook shows similar results.

Lets look at the following examples:

• A site stocking new and used laptops wishes to sell a Toshiba Laptop.

• The number of competing pages for the term ‘Laptop’ is over 200million.

• The site then decides to optimise for the term ‘Toshiba Laptop’ - this however still has over 2.5million results pages!

• The term ‘Toshiba Satellite Laptop’ however has roughly 700,000 competing pages - this would be a sensible term to optimise for

The volume of searches for the above 3 terms (in October 2008) are:

• Laptop - 13.6million
• Toshiba Laptop - 450,000
• Toshiba Satellite Laptop - 110,000

Although the term Toshiba Satellite Laptop has circa 350,000 less searches than Toshiba Laptop a month - the term is more specific, the user is actively in the market for a specific type of model and therefore probably more likely to convert on this term than the other two. *This term may not necessarily be regarded as a real longtail term, but used purely for the purpose of this exercise*

Another point to note is that users are becoming more savvy and the volume of longtail search terms is increasing - users are simply better at ‘Googling’ these days. If you start investing time and resource into longtail now - it will pay even more dividends in time to come.

Does Longtail SEO Result In Less Business?

At a keyword level, the answer to this is yes. However, as you can rank for a larger volume of terms easier, combined with the increased CTRs and conversion rates, you should still be able to drive a comfortable volume of business.

Example below:

Keyword Type	Searches	CTR	Clicks	Conv Rate	Sales
Generic Keyword	1,500,000	2%	30,000	0.5%	150
Longtail Term 7	6250	6.2%	388	1.3%	5
Longtail Term 3	6000	6.5%	390	1.3%	5
Longtail Term 12	5825	6.8%	393	1.4%	6
Longtail Term 4	5500	6.9%	380	1.5%	6
Longtail Term 16	5425	7.0%	380	2.0%	8
Longtail Term 8	5400	7.1%	383	2.0%	8
Longtail Term 1	5000	7.3%	365	2.0%	7
Longtail Term 2	4500	7.5%	338	2.0%	7
Longtail Term 6	4325	8.0%	346	2.0%	7
Longtail Term 15	4125	8.3%	340	2.0%	7
Longtail Term 20	3950	8.5%	336	2.5%	8
Longtail Term 9	3675	8.75%	322	2.5%	8
Longtail Term 11	3540	9.0%	319	3.0%	10
Longtail Term 5	3500	9.3%	324	3.0%	10
Longtail Term 10	2435	9.5%	231	3.0%	7

The example above applies the logic that with decreased volume of searches (and more longtail in nature) comes an increase in CTR and an increase in conversion rate.

As the results show - by opting for the longtail approach you could still drive a decent volume of traffic but more importantly, a sizeable amount of sales / conversions / leads for probably less effort than optimising for one truly large volume driver.

How To Optimise for Longtail SEO?

To effectively optimise for longtail SEO - you do not need to create bespoke pages and content for each longtail variation. This would be un-manageable and simply wierd for the user to read!

If you are focussing on one particular term (or two) then you do not actually need to create individual content per extreme longtail term.

If you have a page that is semi-relevant to your list of targeted longtail terms and it is already indexed and ranked - then you can simply add the other terms into the existing content at a later stage. This process is explained in further detail over at ragepank.

For instance, this post may be targeting the term Longtail SEO, however once the page has been ranked, we could easily rank for related longtail terms such as:

• How Longtail SEO Benefits Small Businesses
• Longtail SEO Can Increase A Businesses Sales
• How Do You Optimise For Longtail SEO

The important point to note is that the longtail terms should be included into content sensibly - do not simply stick them in a list or in the middle of a sentence if it is not relevant. This is not best practice and would simply not appeal to your users.

Longtail SEO is something that should not be sniffed at. It will be easier for smaller advertisers to get rankings on and drive subsequent traffic / sales. It can also be an easy way of larger advertisers getting incremental traffic from.

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