Increase profitability by processing the long-tail!
Surprisingly, many still believe that search engine optimisation is about being high on a few keywords. They put up a few keywords that they watch and they think they are done with their site as long as they do not lose positions on the keywords they watch. Nothing can be more wrong – Search volumes and potential customers often use very many keywords to get information.
It is imperative to look at several different types of keywords and build landing pages that are optimised around search behavior. If your competitors capture the customers earlier in the sales process, it means that your company will eventually lose due to ineffective marketing.
What is the long tail?
The long tail or the long tail that some say in Swedish is a marketing concept used in probability theory, coined by Chris Anderson, which is considered one of the world’s premier marketing giants and he was also the editor of the classic magazine Wired where he wrote about ” The Long Tail “in an article from 2004.
Anderson divided keywords into two different groups: “head” and “tail”. Head consists of the most common keywords within a niche that accounts for a large part of the site’s search engine traffic where a few keywords can generate a large search volume, but there is often a lot of competition about those words. Long-tail, on the other hand, consists of less popular keywords in combinations in other words around it.
Image: In the above example, we reviewed all searches within the niche from Google every month and sorted the information into different keywords and categories as we presented in a search behavior analysis.
On the vertical axis, cost and competition are shown, while on the horizontal axis, the search query is on Google searches every month.
50% of all searches use four or more words
The long tail can consist of 10,000 or hundreds of thousands of keyword combinations. Here the competition is not as hard and the volume is bigger than the head.
The advantage of using long-tail
The advantage of long-tail is that it can compensate for the lower search volume by building up more keywords and combinations that ultimately give greater search volume. Then it is also easy to establish a niche position because of the lower competition.
The primary benefits are that long-tail has better conversion rate and CTR – Click through rate – because those looking for long-tail tend to have clear and driven intentions behind the search. Some examples of the most common reasons are:
- Direct searches: You are looking for a company, brand or person directly.
- Informational searches: You want to quickly find an answer and learn more about a topic.
- Commercial searches: One intends to buy something and want to know more about a product, price or price comparison.
- Site search: You want to go to a certain location.
- Transactions: You want to perform a task like signing up or buying something.
Many SEO companies focus on a few keywords with high search volume, the problem is that that method does not cover the user’s search behavior and therefore misses great as well as relevant traffic to their sites. You can understand why; Head has a large search volume, so as many keywords as long-tail are not required, but competition is very hard with players who may have worked for several years to secure their position around the keyword.
Both the head and the long-tail are important for marketing, if you fail in one of them, the consequence may be that you do not reach as many users as you thought. It is important to know in what context the long-tail can be more effective than head as well as vice versa and then adjust by adjusting the amount of work you benefit to them.
How to create a long-tail report
There are different ways to create a long-tail report. I usually mix different methods, look at the website, competitors, scrape keywords, brainstorm, even more, retrieve data from Adwords and Google Search Consol and finally push down all the keywords. The formatting in Excel removes all duplicate keywords. Through Keyword Planner you get the number of searches per month.
In addition to GSC and Excel, there are also some ranking tools like Semrush, Seolytics, and Searchmetrics that with varied success give you the keywords that you rank on.
Keyword Analysis Reports
You can create keyword analysis reports based on data from Google Search Console. To do a basic report with Google Search Console, do the following:
- Choose search analysis.
- Fill in searches, CTR, click, and position.
- View 500 rows and download as CSV file.
- Import the file into Excel.
- Select data from text and start the text import guide.
- Click next and select comma as the delimiter.
- You now have a complete report that you can process and analyze in Excel.
A common problem is the use of Swedish characters. There are functions in Excel to fix the Swedish characters, otherwise, you must manually select search and replace for; oh, island and island.
Once you have received the data into an Excel spreadsheet, you can use conditional formatting ( Conditional formatting ) in Excel is a fantastic tool to visualize complex data. You can start using color scales for smarter reporting and clarification of all variables and there are predetermined rules that you can use. By doing this you can easily identify which keywords you rank and who you did not write about which helps you when it concretizes what needs to be adjusted.
Use statistics from Adwords
When advertising through AdWords, you can get interesting data through search term reports. There you can sort the number of impressions and get a lot of keywords used. I did a keyword analysis on a customer who appeared to have 33,000 keywords marketed through AdWords over a period of 5 years.
Use different types of tools
AnalyticsEdge has a long-tail report where they:
1. Divide the keywords into individual words.
2. Use regex to delete characters.
3. Divide multiple words into multiple rows.
4. Use a Soundex feature group similar and misspelled words.
5. Merge with historical data and generate a historical trend analysis where you can see if individual words rise or fall over time.
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