Evaluating long tail opportunities

There are two very important things in SEO – links and content. You can never have enough of either. Adding additional content when you already have thousands of product pages might seem like a waste of time so I wanted to show you a good way to evaluate the long tail opportunity in your niche before allocating time & money to content writing.

The best way to look at the long tail is via AdWords because you can broad match and phrase match your target keywords and quickly gain data across the thousands of long tail keywords that trigger your adverts. In the past it’s been quite hard to gain anything useful from this data because Google Analytics only displays the trigger keyword rather than the actual search term. It was possible to install a filter but I doubt many people actually did.

However thanks to the all new Google AdWords interface you can see the exact keywords people are searching for combined with click through rates and cost per conversions right inside AdWords – simply click the button and the data is displayed for your selected ad group.

The way we use the data is to look at the long tail keywords that are getting the most traffic and figure out whether it’s better to build them into your current pages or create brand new pages to target those keywords directly. For informational queries and “how to” queries we recommend a brand new page while modifiers such as “buy” or “cheap” can normally be worked into an existing article.

Long tail traffic is by far the best way of getting more sales and using this method you can identify the keywords far easier than by using keyword tools.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 11:29am ON Monday, 7 September 2009

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+