So many people are obsessed. Obsessed with website TRAFFIC that is. It would seem that many are more concerned with attracting HUGE volumes of traffic with little regard to the quality of the visitors and whether or not they are converting into paying customers. Afterall, whats the point in spending loads of money on promoting your site online, when your bounce rate is 70% and very few of the visitors are doing what you actually want them to do, ie buy a product, sign up to your newsletter or make an enquiry?

It’s easy to lose focus of what our aims are. How many of us have drifted in and out of life forgetting why we are really here and not establishing a purpose for our lives? The same  applies to our websites. It’s easy to lose site of the actions we want our visitors to take.

Top Ranking For Broad Keyords – The Misconception

The truth is that many people think that ranking in the top 10 for the really competitive search terms is going to bring them huge numbers of visitors. The fact is that unless you are in the top 3, you will see very few visitors.

As a rule of thumb (and this was researched some time back) if you are placed in the top 5 for any given keyword, you can expect the following percentage of traffic numbers:

#1 – 42%

#2 – 11.9%

#3 – 8.5%

#4 – 6.1%

#5 – 4.9%

So for example. If a given search for example “holiday spain” receives around 500 organic searches per month, you can expect 210 clicks per month if you are in the #1 position. Now, you can see that if you are #2 you will get approximately 60 visits per month and for #3 around 45 visits per month. The further down you are in the top 10 the less traffic you will get. Not great eh?

When you consider just how much time, money, sweat and effort it will take to get to the #1 position, you can begin to see how chasing broad high volume keywords in most cases is a LOSING battle.

The “Long Tail” has been cited a lot in SEO circles over the last year or so and although many optimizers are now familiar with the concept, this is not really the case with the average client and website owner.

So, the main idea of this post is to make SEO clients and SEO newbie practioners aware of what Long Tail keywords are, why they are more valuable than your average “broad keywords” and in my next post, how you can learn neat techniques to help you find long tail keyword opportunities in order to attract those clients who are just waiting to pay for your service or product.

So without further a do, take a look at the image below.

Long Tail Traffic

The image above depicts typical search volumes for almost all websites. To the left we have the “broad keywords” (red) and to the right we have the “long tail keywords” (green). The tail is much longer than can be shown in our chart but imagine it is around 3 times longer, and you get the picture.

What this means is that collectively, the long tail traffic equates to around 75-80% of a websites search traffic.

Typical Long Tail Searches

So that you know what I am referring to when speaking about long tail and broad or “short tail” keywords here are two examples.

“spain property”

“apartments for sale in los flamingos marbella”

See the difference? One is highly targeted, the other is very broad.

The question is, whats the difference between the two searchers and which one would you rather have?

Well the broad searcher is at the bottom of the buying process. Generally people who are looking to buy property and are serious are more specific with their searches as they know just what they want. So someone who searches for “spain property” or something similar is very unclear about what they want and is likely to be one of those one page visitors, “window shoppers” if you like.

The long tail searcher on the other hand is what we want. They are more precise with their searches, they are ready to buy and have a clear vision of what it is they want. All you have to do is give it to them!

Advantages Of Long Tail Traffic

There are a number of advantages of long tail traffic including

1. Less Competition – Long tail keywords are generally much much easier to rank for as your competitors chase the broader keywords thinking there is “gold in them there hills”.

2. Costs Less – With links having become somewhat of a commodity, buying any kind of link becomes expensive. This is not the case with the long tail as you do not need to spend so much time and money link building although you cant stop that link building campaign altogether.

3. More Convertible – There can be no doubt. The long tail is the pot of gold. The holy grail of search traffic. The long tail converts far better than the broad search terms.

What You Need To Target the Long Tail Keywords

There is one thing you will most definitely need when targeting the long tail keywords.

“Unique” CONTENT – Content is king for sure. Without it, you have no content to optimize for the long tail keywords. its also important that the content you have on your site is not duplicated, ie not scraped from other sites on the web. Google and the other engines will not index duplicate content, meaning your pages will be of no use and will not be shown in the search results.

Example Of A Long Tail Strategy

The Real Estate Website – The real estate industry is tough! With so many sites out there competing for so few customers its a tough niche to do well in. There are ways that you can target the long tail though and bring in lots more relevant traffic.

1. Make sure your deeper listings are unique content and NOT MLS syndicated. This is a tough proposition for most but is KEY to successfully targeting the long tail.

2. Make sure that as many of your listings are crawlable and indexed.

3. Add your most important listings pages to your sitemap.

4. Be sure to link to your deep content via featured listings that rotate on the site, or via regular blog posting and other internal link opportunities.

5. Bookmark as many of your most important listings as possible to help the engines and users find them.

6. Brainstorm with colleagues and friends as many keywords, modifiers and descriptors as possible. (I will show you how to do this in my next post)

7. Make sure that the listings are well optimized, ie title tags, alt tags meta data and that the main copy/text is keyword rich. Try to mention words that your searchers may use such as disabled friendly, pet friendly, villa, apartment, private pool, close to shops, close to bearch etc etc. Your users do use these words, trust me!

How To Research And Find Long Tail Keywords

Stay tuned. My next post will detail a number of techniques that you can use to carry out long tail keyword research.