As I write this, I just came back from a meeting with a potential client with a startup who wants to make sure they bake SEO into their website from the start while also not making any SEO gaffes along the way. They were referred to me from a current client who was in similar shoes about a year ago. I love working with startups who have a well-thought-out business model, which is in part to create a website and business so great that it dominates their space.
During the course of our conversation one of the many things we discussed was the need for a "long-tail keyword strategy." Which makes sense because part of dominating any niche is showing up in the search results for any and all keyword phrases that relate to the business. We talked about the usual long-tail keyword vehicles...a resource center on the website, a blog, etc., all of which this company was planning to implement down the line.
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After the meeting I made a quick stop at Trader Joe's for nuts and berries for my husband (I think he's part chimpanzee!). When I got home it was noon so I fired up my "Jill Whalen Daily," which provides me with great lunchtime reading. The paper.li dailies are cool because they provide you with all the links your Twitter followers posted during the last 24 hours. I often use mine to help me find good articles to submit to Sphinn, as well as to keep up with the latest news in the search marketing world and beyond. As I was browsing it today, however, I was thinking that I shouldn't be reading other people's articles because I had a newsletter to write and no clue what to write about! My only excuse was that perhaps I would get inspired by something I read.
Thankfully for me (and you, faithful reader), I did! The very first article I read gave me exactly the inspiration I needed.
The article in question was Ian Lurie's "SEO 101: Defining the long tail" .
If you'd like, go ahead and read it before continuing – I'll wait. Just be sure to come back because I'm going to tell you why Ian is wrong in his explanation of the long tail for SEO.
Let me start by saying that I have tons of respect for Ian, whom I met this past year at a conference we were both speaking at. He's wildly intelligent, with the dry sense of humor for which I'm a total sucker. Of the articles he's written that I've read, I mostly agree with him – but not always. Which of course is part of what keeps SEO so fun and interesting...we all have our own opinions and definitions of stuff.
With that out of the way, and with you having had enough time to read Ian's article, here are my thoughts on SEO and long-tail keywords. Let's start with what I do agree with in Ian's article.
His definition:
The Long Tail
"Specific, niche search phrases, usually more than 2 words in length, that offer a low competition, low search volume and high searcher intent."
I mostly agree with that definition, although I'd say usually more than 3 words in length because most 3-word search queries do not have low search volume.
And I suppose that is the crux of my disagreement. He provides 3 made-up examples of long-tail keyword phrases, but in my opinion only 2 of them are truly long tail.
His examples revolve around socks, and he rightfully explains why optimizing and ranking highly for the one word "socks" is not the best SEO strategy. It will provide you with lots of traffic to your site, but it's untargeted traffic, and therefore less likely to convert for you. That is, the person who comes to your site after typing the one word "socks" into Google is less likely to purchase socks from you than the person who typed "socks with cats on them" (another of Ian's example phrases). I definitely agree with this. And I also agree that the phrase "socks with cats on them" is likely to be a true long-tail keyword phrase.
Ian also uses "socks that knock my socks off" as a potential long-tail phrase, and goes on to say that these types of phrases, in aggregate, can provide as much traffic to a website as the one word "socks," while providing the bulk of the sales. Once again, I agree.
Keyword Gems as Opposed to Long-Tail Keywords
Where I start to disagree is with the third keyword phrase that Ian uses as a long-tail keyword: "red wool socks." While he was obviously just making up examples, "red wool socks" is unlikely to be a long-tail phrase – it's what I call a "keyword gem." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFWe4xCmTQs)
There's a very big difference between keyword gems and long-tail keywords. Keyword gems are those that a lot of people use in the search engines, but they don't have as much competition as the much more general keyword "socks." This differs from long-tail keywords, which aren't used much in the search engines.
Long-tail keywords – in the truest sense of what long-tail means – are those that may get searched only once a month, once a quarter, or even once a year. Sometimes even just once in a lifetime! In fact, they may not ever show up in most keyword research tools as viable keywords. (Especially now that Google has basically wiped them out of their keyword research database...but that's a story for another day.)
You Don't Optimize for Long Tail
Because long-tail keywords are so few and far between and can't easily be researched, you can't optimize for them – not in the traditional SEO sense. But that's okay, and in fact, it's the beauty of long-tail keywords. Anybody can receive highly targeted traffíc from them, regardless of your level of knowledge of SEO! All you have to do is have content on your website. It doesn't even have to be good content, although it should be good if you want it to convert for you. The content can even be user-generated, as in a forum, or in blog comments, product reviews, or pretty much anything that puts words on your pages.
By Jill Whalen (c) 2010
