What’s The Secret to Getting Great Traffic Online? Long-tailed keywords

by Adelard Gasana

First, what is a “Long-tailed keyword”? It is a keyword phrase that has 3 or more words in it. I prefer to rank higher for long-tailed keyword phrases versus generic keyword phrases for one reason: profitability. Also, the competition is most likely not paying attention to them.

Here is an example, if I want to buy a car, and know the kind of car I am looking for, for instance a Dodge Viper; I am going to type in “Dodge Viper Dealership Miami”. But If I am simply looking for information on a Dodge Viper I will probably type in “Dodge Viper”. That’s how most Internet users think. Only when they are truly ready to buy a “Dodge Viper” will they ask for a more detailed search.

If I was a car dealership owner in Miami, and knew this information, why in the world would I want to rank for simply “Dodge Viper”? I won’t, because that keyword does not help me get customers. Let’s say a 10-year-old kid who doesn’t know how the new Dodge Viper looks like types that into a search engine, if I come up will that make me money? Probably not. The problem is that anybody doing research, or simply curious will type in that generic term. But when people are ready to buy, they will type in what I call “buying” terms.

These buying terms are words like “buy” “get” “purchase” for products, and services “help” “services”, “consultation”, etc. It really depends on the specific industry which terms are used by your customers. For car dealerships, the word “dealership” and the city they currently live in works. For mortgage companies, the word “refinance” and the state they are in works better … the city also helps.

The easiest way to find long-tailed keywords is to look into your stats. If you have AwStats, Google Analytics, Urchin, etc, you should have something setup to monitor your keywords and be able to see what people are typing. Using the “Dodge Viper” example…. If you are the car dealership owner’s search engine optimization company, you will notice people might be coming to your client’s site with a particular keyword that you probably have not optimized or targeted for since you are getting traffic for the word, let’s say “2010 Dodge Viper with Leather,” simply setup a page that uses that key phrase as the targeted keyword, and you will start getting more traffic for that. The important thing is to look for buying terms for your industry in your stats. Look for words that are being used that are converting into sales. What you will find is sometimes surprising.

Another way to find out what your visitors are really looking for is to install a customized search engine onto your site that will allow you to view all the keywords which a consumer types in. When a searcher finds a website through a search engine like Google, and then does another additional on-site search, I call it Secondary Search. The user does this Secondary search to find more accurately what they were looking for.
Most people have Google as their generic search engine, but unfortunately Google won’t tell you how many times a particular term was searched for on your site. I use Sphider (http://www.sphider.eu) for this. It allows me to setup a custom search engine, return the results in my website’s template, tell it when to re-index my site (in cases of new updates etc – I setup my sites for re-indexing every 24 hours), and allows me to control the weight and ranking of the title, url, keywords, so I can optimize, and show the best results for my site. Also, it allows me to view all the keywords, and the order they where typed in.

To really get started, get out your list of keywords and see if you can add different buying terms respective to your industry. Target those phrases in your SEO campaign using the data you mined from your custom search and your stats.

Let the competition get the generic phrases like “Dodge Viper”, and you take on “Dodge Viper with Leather”, “Dodge Venom Viper”, Dodge Viper car dealership (insert city)”, etc. They get the 10-year-old kid, the researchers, and the curious visitors, while you the traffic that is ready to buy.

The secret is not how much traffic you get, but the type of traffic you get. I think you would prefer the kind with less competition, and people ready to buy, wouldn’t you agree?