SEO: Longtail is King

I need to write an involved article on link building, because in my opinion a lot of SME’s are completely failing to understand one of the biggest secrets of SEO - the Longtail.

Too often I’m approached by people who are looking for just one or two keywords to rank for - often very similar.

The problem is, by trying to compete for the biggest traffic keywords, they’re missing the huge volume of Longtail traffic - low volume search terms related to their business, which can convert especially well.

For example - I have a client who is badly sandboxed for his major keywords. About 1 third are top of Google, but the other 2 thirds are in the higher tens and even low hundreds.

You’d think that’s bad, right?

However, I haven’t tried to rank him for just one or two keywords, but for dozens of very different ones.

And the result is that he captures so much Longtail traffic that his SEO campaign is already more than profitable.

We proved this over the recent holiday period, when he went aboard and switched all his PPC off.

His visitor numbers halved, but in the two-weeks of absence, he still made almost 100 sales totally £8k in revenues from the SEO alone. And sales generation from the SEO worked out about 60% cheaper than PPC.

More than that, we’ve shown that high-traffic keywords are much poorer at converting than individual products names.

Someone looking for a product may browse various sites and product options before buying - this is your high volume keywords as the consumer is searching.

However, once they’ve decided what product they want to buy, this is when they go into Longtail - product names, specifications, regional suffixes, and various keyword combinations relating to the product.

Rank for these, and you’re far more likely to make a sale, because the consumer has already made a decision to purchase before visiting your site - you just need to ensure that you offer a decent shopping experience when they get there.

In the meantime, I’m sure plenty of SME’s are going to continue targeting those high-traffic keywords - and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that

But you ignore the Longtail at your peril.

HINT: Forget link bombing - think about link building for keyword families.

More information on basic link building techniques for Longtail here: Introduction to Link Building