SEO Tip – Chasing (Your Own) Long Tail

Search engine optimization (SEO), just like housework, is never done. Just when you think you might be finished, it’s time to start all over again! By the way if you do think SEO is something you only do once, or infrequently, for your web site you might need to rethink that idea.

SEO is a constantly moving target, and you need to be on the ball to try to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of search engine results. This is a lot of work, so knowing what things are most important is vital in keeping the workload to a minimum.

What Is The Long Tail?

Volume of searches plotted for keywords shows the long tail

You can’t look at SEO for too long without encountering the concept of the long tail. I’ve included my own (poor) attempt at a graphic here to illustrate the idea. Basically, if we plot the volume of searches against keywords and phrases, we can see that a number of them have a higher search volume than others. These are the mainstream keywords and it’s very difficult for us to optimize for them, simply because of their popularity.

Others have a much lower volume and aren’t searched for quite so often. This latter group forms what is known in SEO circles as the long tail.

Why Is The Long Tail Important?

Those new to SEO, particularly if they’re using AdWords and competing for keywords and phrases, often make the mistake of going for the most popular, and as many keywords as they can. It isn’t long, though, before their advertising budget gets eaten up with hardly any clicks or return, and they give up with the conclusion that whatever they’re doing doesn’t work.

On the other hand, those people who work on optimizing for the long tail phrases can often reap significant rewards, so it’s worth taking the time to learn more about it.

For example, let’s say you’re a polar bear photographer in northern Canada and want more web site traffic. Trying to optimize your web site for “photographer” or “Canada” is going to be difficult, because there’s so much global competition for those words. But what about “Canadian polar bear portraits” or “polar bear wedding photography in Canada”? This is a lot more specific and you’re more likely to find your target audience, because someone searching for that phrase is quite obviously searching for something more than just a photographer.

If you take another look at that graph above, you can also see that the long tail has the potential to be as large in total volume as the main body of most popular searches. In fact, the long tail is probably infinite in size, although the phrases at the far end will obviously be a lot less useful.

How To Find Long Tail Phrases

There are several ways to discover useful long tail phrases that can be useful to your specific business, and you might be surprised at some of the phrases you find that you had otherwise missed. Here’s a short list of methods that can work well:

• Simply brainstorm ideas
• Use any of the keyword tools to be found on the web
• Check out your competitors’ web pages
• Look through your own Google Analytics data for keyword ideas

What To Do With Long Tail Phrases?

Once you’ve identified phrases that you want to optimize for, you can start to add new content to your web site aimed at targeting specifically those phrases. You can add new pages to the site, write a blog article, post a YouTube video, or any one of a number of new ways to add content to the site.

As long as that content is able to be indexed by the search engines, and you have at least one text link to the content on the site, you should start to see it appear in the index when you search for that phrase. The length of time it takes for the search engines to add the content can vary wildly, from a few hours to several weeks, depending on how often the search engine robots crawl your site and update their index.

I understand that this has been a very superficial look at SEO and the long tail, but I hope it’s enough to encourage you to learn more and read further on the subject. As always, I welcome any comments, suggestions or corrections and please pass this on to someone you think might benefit from it.

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Photography Website SEO long tail search, search engine optimization, SEO