At your first foray into employing SEO services you’re likely to have a few keywords in mind that will cover your target market. But do they?

It is very easy to identify the most popular search term in any given industry however these terms actually account for less than 30% of total searches on the Internet today.

The remaining 70% of search terms lie in what is referred to as ‘long tail’ keywords which are made up of the millions of low volume unique searches performed perhaps just a handful of times per day, month or year.

Due to the low volumes on offer, these keywords are rarely shown in the many keyword tools, so how can you capture this market?

What is Long Tail?

Long tail keywords are most commonly thought as being more than three words in length.

E.g.

How To Identify Long Tail Keywords

The most accurate data for your Customers’ search habits can be found within your analytics data. If you use Google Analytics, you can find what I like to refer to as the ‘hidden gold’ within your keywords data to identify long tail trends. To find this, simple enter your Analytics account and click Traffic Sources > Keywords and select to show ‘Non-paid’ traffic. This will show you all of the search terms used to navigate to your website.

If however you are just starting out or haven’t been collecting this data, then an alternative is to have a brainstorming session to create a spider diagram of the different product/service categories and subcategories that you provide. As well as helping to identify long-tail keyword advantages this exercise can, if performed effectively, assist in determining a URL and Page Title structure that is absolutely vital for effective SEO as well as usability.

An alternative is to assess the top 10 results (Conventional Page 1 google.com.au) results of your major search term. Look at obvious elements such as URL, Page Title and keyword field of competitors to spot trends in the keywords used to describe the products or services they offer as well as keywords dropped into copy or other products/services cross sold.

How to capture Long-Tail search terms

So just how to you capture these search terms? The first thing to do is to look at the product or service you’re offering. Does your keyword list cover all variations? 10 keywords may not be enough and you may be better suited to a 20 or 30 keyword SEO Package to cover a wider area.

Do you provide unique descriptions of your products with full detail of what is on offer? (E.g. Not those provided to you by a Manufacturer/Distributor that they send to everybody else selling their product), including details such as model number, size, colour or other something else uniquely relevant to the product? By providing full descriptions and every bit of information that is useful to a visitor you can capture thousands of long tail searches naturally without trying to shoehorn random keywords into your existing copy. For example, listing the full specs of a Nikon Camera could result in capturing a visit from a search query of:

‘nikon coolpix camera 6mp silver 2010′

Obviously, you still want your copy to be natural, useful and most importantly engaging for your potential Customer. If you can cover all of the above, you’re making your website more appealing to both your Customer and the search engines who both love unique, relevant and up to date content.

It has been a mantra for some time that ‘Content is king’, and the huge long-tail search opportunities of offer could not demonstrate this more.

Andrew Gloyns – SEO Manager, Web Marketing Experts

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