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

39 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
Magnus July 9th, 2008 at 4:49 pm 16
Good idea, will take time with Google analytics and find the pest ones. Thanks, never thought of this before.
Nelly July 16th, 2008 at 6:39 pm 17
The idea is perfect, why it didn’t appeared into my mind ?
Link Building Bible August 2nd, 2008 at 12:28 am 18
Yah…. and boy do I have tons of long tails… luckily, they all say pretty much the same thing, so it’s cool to see how people phrase stuff when looking for stuff that my blog has, so when I write about it again, I know what kind of phrases to use that will help me to rank higher….
HID August 12th, 2008 at 4:47 pm 19
I agree… I am always looking at not only what terms I received traffic from but how many different terms did I see traffic from!
HID August 12th, 2008 at 4:48 pm 20
Just to give some insight I had 4,145 different term in july…not bad if im must say so myself : )
grass going dormant September 11th, 2008 at 7:18 am 21
Everyday I always check my stats on Statcounter. Sometimes I feel happy when I saw there a visitor come to my site but sadly it is all come from my own visit. So I create a blocking cookie and hope better result soon.
irish gifts September 12th, 2008 at 1:22 pm 22
Monitoring your stats can be really advantageous.

Install Google analytics and see where people are coming from. There maybe things you haven’t thought of yet
Irish Gift Ideas October 18th, 2008 at 9:25 pm 23
You’re right - it is addictive.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look something up in Google…
William Gardner October 20th, 2008 at 12:30 pm 24
I find that you can get a lot of longtail traffic through posting about your targeted keywords, and using words linkl ‘review/benefits/advantages/how-to/ etc…

So - “The benefits of blogging for SEO - How to”
safepay casino November 5th, 2008 at 2:35 pm 25
safepay casino…

allophonic waving courser …
Wholesale November 5th, 2008 at 5:55 pm 26
I’m always on a quest to understand my visitors better. I wish there was a better tool for google keyword targeting and if google analytics didn’t give me mixed information that would be nice too!

I am still getting visitors registering on google with 0:00 time spent visiting the site. So in other words they visited and hit ALT+F4 instantly on their browser! Ridiculous if you ask me.. GAH!

Great Article!

-Jason
Haruyoshi November 7th, 2008 at 10:46 am 27
Yes I do, :0
Gloucestershire Web Design November 15th, 2008 at 3:26 pm 28
I find writing blog articles the perfect way in putting in possible long tail keywords - you can really target trends of searching
Armen Shirvanian November 26th, 2008 at 2:12 am 29
This is an advantageous reminder for site owners to keep in mind, as they could use it as a mechanism to decide what to write about next. Going through one’s own items to see what has worked, and expanding upon that, may be an inside-the-site methodology, but it is unused enough to remain as an outside-the-box procedure. Site owners sometimes see likely successes through connecting searched words into an article.
Mallorca Immobilien January 26th, 2009 at 4:16 pm 30
Hello, a long time we have tried to optimize our main Keywords like Mallorca and didn´t have any results. We have done a research on our market and could see that long trail keywords like are Immobilienmakler Mallorca much more easier and bring many qualified visitors.
It´s very important to analyse the market before having much work for less results.
MPU January 30th, 2009 at 12:46 pm 31
I was always asking what can be a long tail. But now I understand. Long tail could also be a long synonim?
Creatin March 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 am 32
So is long tail something like an entire sentence? Have I understood it right?
Latest Gadgets March 22nd, 2009 at 4:28 am 33
yes i have,
Rahul Jadhav March 23rd, 2009 at 7:23 pm 34
lol…even i am a stat addict. I check now and then to see whether it has increased or not. I always try to concentrate on the posts that are not getting popular
Latest Gadgets April 2nd, 2009 at 9:32 am 35
Yes, I have!
Mobile Broadband April 10th, 2009 at 10:19 am 36
I really like this.
aquabot April 10th, 2009 at 10:34 am 37
really very nice post
internet community April 17th, 2009 at 3:31 pm 38
Hello Mapelli,

i like your blog and the articles you write. You make things easy to understand even for newbies.
ow t the long tail. We hired a seo in Germany to optimize our site. The price was to high for our budget. So he proposed us to optimize the long tail. First I didn´t know waht he meant, but then he explained and sent us the link to your blog.
I find that type of optimization perfect, it allows people with less budget to have a chance in the search engines.
Reiki Master June 17th, 2009 at 10:15 pm 39
Hi,
I’m looking for a free webmail client that allows you to create emails to be sent at a time in the future that you specify? Is there such a thing? I know that Yahoo and Gmail do not do this.