My name is Charles Preston and I am president and founder of Click Response, an Austin Texas
based search engine marketing company. I have personally achieved 1st page ranking for thousands
of keywords across hundreds of websites. After 10 years of search engine marketing
experience I have seen many evolutions occur in the SEO industry, with the search engines
themselves and in how SEO is done.
Most of what I have learned has come from my own hard won experience and rigorous
testing over the years in regards to what works and what doesn't work in SEO. Obviously
a lot has changed over the years and what worked just 1 year ago does not work today.
Why the report?
The reason I wrote this report is to share 1 thing in particular that in all my years
of experience in this field sticks out as being one of the most significant ideas about
how to approach SEO. This 1 tactic can be summed up in 2 words and is such a powerful
factor in any SEO campaign that it alone will determine the success or failure of that campaign.
This two word phrase that denotes the single most important factor in any SEO campaign is...
"Long Tail"
Here is Wikipedia's definition of The Long Tail...
"The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by
Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article[1] to describe certain business
and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power
can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of
popular items at large volumes. The term long tail is also generally used in
statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use."
How does it apply to SEO?
Ok so what does this have to do with search engine marketing? Well let's
take a look at what search engine marketing is. More and more consumers begin
their buying cycle these days online by doing research or a search for the
products or services they are looking for.
Business owners want to be found by these consumers and employ search
engine marketing to achieve a 1st page placement in a major search engine for targeted key phrases.
What is SEO again?
Think about search engine traffic as a road with traffic on it. There are
different roads for each search engine. Off those roads there are side
streets designated by street signs or key phrases in this case. These
are the established routes that people are taking to find what they want.
So rather than constructing a building then building a road to allow traffic
to access it since the roads and traffic patterns are already established you
need to decide which street signs or key phrases will create the right
traffic for your business then plant your business on those
streets so that the right traffic will find you.
If you look at the way this works it becomes clear that the most
important part of this process is making sure you put your business in
front of the right traffic routes or in other words - that you optimize
your website for the right keywords.
What exactly do we mean by "the right keywords"? The "right" keywords
are the ones that will bring you the most targeted and qualified leads
which in turn will convert into sales most often thereby giving you
the most return on your investment (ROI) for the money you spent to achieve the ranking.
That is the only job real SEO should perform. Finding the right keywords to put
you in front of your most valuable prospects then getting your website to appear
on the 1st page of a major search engine for as many of those keywords as possible.
Anything else called "SEO" is worthless.
Ok so back to The Long Tail and how it can make or break an SEO campaign.
A case study
Many times when I first talk to a client they tell me they want to rank for
the 1-2 word key phrases that are getting huge amounts of monthly traffic
in their niche. Going for the big traffic keywords seems like a pretty
smart idea until you learn about how The Long Tail plays into the
keyword selection process.
Let's say I get a client who sells Insurance. They tell me that they
want to rank for the keywords "insurance, life insurance, travel insurance,
health insurance, and car insurance". Each one of those keywords gets in excess of a million searches per month.
Keep in mind I am using this as an example to illustrate a much larger point.
In real life it wouldn't matter who the client was or what keywords they wanted to target.
So at this point I have two choices as a professional consultant. I can either
A give the client what he wants and proceed to inform him that those keywords
are EXTREMELY competitive but have huge upside potential once he gets a first
page ranking for them but that it will take approximately 2-3 years to rank
and will it will cost somewhere in the realm of $130k per year to go after them.
Whether or not this client has that kind of a budget or not
is irrelevant to the fact that either out of sheer ignorance or greed
on my part I have completely missed the boat on what I "could" have delivered
to this client in terms of raw value and ROI.
The Long Tail applied
Now had I employed the The Long Tail principle to this I would have option B, which would look something like this...
First of all I do a little more research into what the client is selling in specific.
I find out that he sells insurance in California. I find out that California has specific
laws regarding insurance. I also find out that he sells travel accident insurance
and not just "travel insurance". I find out that the kinds of health insurance
he sells specifically are "group health insurance, family health insurance and
individual health insurance", each of which are classified as separate "products".
How keyword analysis works
At this point we need to go on a small tangent. One thing to understand about how
SEO firms do keyword research is that we use a number of tools that allow us to
actually see exactly what people searched for last month and approximately
how many times those terms were searched for. These tools show us a "sampling"
of search activity across a number of sources that tends to be mostly accurate
to base predictions on if you know how to read the data right.
The Wordtracker keyword analysis service uses data from Dogpile and
Metacrawler which are "metasearch engines" which means they don't
actually send out crawlers to index pages on the internet like Google
or Yahoo but simply funnel searches to those other engines and during
that process keep track of which keywords are being searched for.
The Overture tool uses data from Yahoo. My company uses both
tools plus another tool that gives us access to Google search data as well for a more rounded view.
When we start the keyword analysis process we start by using very general
1-2 word phrases like "insurance, health insurance, car insurance,
etc" and from that we get back a pretty long list of "associated keywords"
that were searched for the previous month. This list of associated keywords
coming off the primary key phrases is where the Long Tail is located.
Herein ends the tangent we took earlier and we return to option B
of our hypothetical case study where we apply The Long Tail principle.
More applied Long Tail
Based on the additional research we did we have some additional key phrase
possibilities to explore. Our aim here is specificity. The Long Tail
principle as it applies to search engine marketing keyword analysis
says that the more specific your keywords are the more targeted the
traffic you will get which will translate into more sales conversions from that traffic.
Allot of research has been done over
the past few years that reveals how modern consumers are
using the internet in their buying cycles. When consumers first begin their
buying cycle they go online and do general research using 1 and 2 word phrases
simply because they do not know much about the subject at first hence the need for the search.
In the next phase after they have done the initial research
they begin to hone in on the exact kind of product or service they want
which usually means their searches start getting more specific consisting of 3-4 word phrases.
Those 3-4 word phrases are The Long Tail keywords that have 2 distinct advantages as opposed to the big traffic keywords
1. There is less competition for them which means less time and energy to rank for them which means a more affordable SEO campaign.
2. They convert to sales much more often than 1-2 word phrases due to the fact that the 3-4 phrases are being used towards the "end" of the consumer buying cycle and not the beginning.
Graphic by Elliance
Case study conclusion
So back to our case study. After doing the research and employing the Long Tail principle rather than targeting keywords like...
"insurance, life insurance, travel insurance, health insurance, and car insurance"
We arrive at keywords like...
"California group health insurance, travel accident insurance, California blue cross insurance, etc"
The Long Tail keywords are more specific. Albeit they get much less traffic individually but
from our research we can end up with around 30-40 excellent Long Tail keywords each
getting a few hundred to a few thousand searches per month which adds up.
In conclusion
I hope that this report has explained why using the The Long Tail principle in
SEO is critical to the success of the campaign. At the end of the day what is
"success" in terms of an SEO campaign?
Is it 1st page ranking alone? That depends on which keywords you are
ranking for and how much you spent to achieve that ranking. If those
rankings are not creating enough actual sales or client acquisition for
your company to offset the amount you invested in the campaign then
that campaign was unsuccessful.
By using The Long Tail strategy your SEO campaign becomes exponentially
more effective and affordable, delivering more value for each dollar spent.
Looking for an awesome SEO provider?
Finding an SEO service provider can be difficult. Things you will want to look for are...
1. Longevity. Have they been around for at least 5 years.
2. Proof of expertise. Can they show you several case studies or successful results for other companies that you can verify for yourself?
3. Trustworthy. Can you speak with their existing clients?
4. Customer Service. Do they answer the phone when you call? Do they respond to your inquiries in a timely manner? Will you have an easily accessible live human being attending to your account once you sign up?
5. Do they care enough about you ROI to employ the use of The Long Tail principle?
If you would like to learn how my company, Click Response
can meet all of this criteria and receive a custom quote for SEO
services from me please fill out the form below and Diana our
new accounts manager will call you to set up a good time to talk.
Best Success,
Charles Preston
Full Name:
Company Name:
Email Address:
Website Address:
Age Of Website:
Sample Target Keywords:
Phone:
SpamCheck
In order to prevent Spam to our online forms, we have implemented a spam checking
feature. Please type the answer to nine plus five in the field below.Thank you for your patience.
Graphic by Elliance