Have you ever dug into your own long tail?

26 Aug

You know how it goes when you’re a blogger… you love to check your stats every five minutes.

But too often we look at the popular search terms that took visitors to our site, and forget about the less popular ones.
Our own long tail.

Digging into our own long tail can be effective in many ways:

Find inspiration for future posts

Long tail search terms are uncommon groups of keywords.

This means they often point out non-banal relations between concepts and they can offer inspiration for future posts, because they raise questions or point out something you may want to investigate and write about.

Understand your visitors better

Tipical long tail search term is a long sentence, and it’s focused, so it let you know exactly what the visitor was interested in.

Since a blog is a source of information, knowing what type of information the visitor wants is the key for offering a better service.

Optimize posts with side keywords

There are some pages that does not rank well for their main keywords, because the top spots in the serps are crowded with different sites, but they rank well for a couple main keyword + side keyword.

Looking in the long tail is a great way to find this “side keywords” and optimize the pages (or future posts on the same topics) using together main keyword and side keywords.

What do you think?
What are the other advantages of long tail digging (apart from finding out google oddities and funny search term you rank for)?

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About: blogging

15 Responses for "Have you ever dug into your own long tail?"

Stella Roy September 1st, 2007 at 8:04 pm 1
you are an expert in getting high google ranking whereas on other hand I am struggling to get visitors to my blogs. feeling very depress..

-Stella Roy
Amiya Sarkar September 14th, 2007 at 9:06 pm 2
Well, how did you know that I check my stats every 5 minutes? A very neatly written post with wit and humor embedded.
Chris September 25th, 2007 at 7:46 am 3
I think it’s very important to know how to get in front of the google searches, but also you need to know how to attract & keep your visitors
mutuo-perche October 29th, 2007 at 3:50 pm 4
Are there online free tools which let you find long tail keywords to optimize your site? As far as I know, there’s Hit Tail, too bad it’s not free…
SirCommy December 13th, 2007 at 6:45 pm 5
So now I see another mistake that I’ve done, I gotta start documenting myself more on this and get back to you.
Thanks for pointing that out!
Bob Ritchie January 25th, 2008 at 1:54 pm 6
Great post. Often delving into the long tail can provide substantial additional traffic to your top keyphrases. It’s also a worthwhile approach if you’re temporarily sandboxed with a new domain.
paulette January 29th, 2008 at 2:50 pm 7
One should really understand his niche to be able to acquire more traffic. Sometimes unpopular posts have higher traffic than expected because some of them really follow the theory of emphathy. Remember that in blogging, te greater majority shall be taken into consideration.
Hands on Bricklaying January 31st, 2008 at 10:56 pm 8
Ranking for long tail keywords is useful for 2 reasons.

1) You get the “Low Hanging Fruit” as it were. Don’t try to rank off the bat for “Mortgage” cos it ain’t going to happen. But you might stand a chance of ranking for “4x salary mortgage” say.

2) Each of the long tail keywords often help you to rank for your 1st tier keywords too.

If you’ll forgive me, take the name I’ve used here “Hands on Bricklaying”. That’s a long tail keyword, that also helps me rank for the 1st tier keyword “Bricklaying”. 2 birds with one stone and all that.
SirCommy February 2nd, 2008 at 9:33 am 9
It’s all about specificity and accuracy in all of your content structure. Many update, add and always forget about what they leave behind, untouched. A proper continuous analysis should do the trick.
NJ Web Design February 19th, 2008 at 3:39 pm 10
These days your are going to have to optimize for long tail keywords anyway, the one or two keyword phrases are very competitive.
Alinvest April 21st, 2008 at 9:29 pm 11
Good question and advise Fra.
At one of my sites, which got to be so huge after some time, due to adding so many articles weekly, at some point, I just forgot about many articles, their SEO/keywords, their activity and appearance in search engines. In fact, after getting a more free weekend, I started digging and found out how popular some were and I simply had no idea. After doing some good digging I decided to concentrate and make a similarity of keywords with those old ones, make more articles of those that were searched and visited. After 1-2 months I woke up with many linking back to many posts and getting much more visitors. So it’s definitely for the best to do an analysis and dig up your long tail.
Wii Fit Accessories May 24th, 2008 at 5:10 am 12
This is the method that I used for many of my posts… I just dig through my stats and find something good…
Sandpoint Idaho Real Estate June 23rd, 2008 at 7:48 pm 13
I also used this method very often and I like it.
Cataloguizer June 26th, 2008 at 4:12 pm 14
Long tails are really good to focus in the beginning while you’re slowly rising in rankings for more competitive phrases as you’re very likely to rank much better for them which in turn will bring some traffic and help website/blog before main phrases kick in properly.
Pass Drug Test June 28th, 2008 at 8:16 pm 15
I view statistic every day and anylize all keywords