Blogging; SEO optimizing & winning the long tail search

Winning the long tail search is a topic of marketing concern. More and more, people are finding us around the words we engage in and around online.

Our future client’s, members, friends, heck maybe even spouses are online searching words that matter- to them! Their searches lead them to the communities, solutions and online products/services that align with their interests and wants and needs.

Being ‘found’ around what we marketers call category words such as love, shoes, restaurants is both expensive and ineffective ( for most of us). Shoes are great but what type of shoes are you selling? Love is great but might you want to chunk that down a bit? Restaurant is a great word but what I want to know is where is the best Sushi in Seattle…

Get my drift? Words matter.Specific words matter most.

Enter the long tail. Think back door. Think billions of searches. Think questions looking for answers and solutions. Think about winning lots of small searches that are customized to your particular solutions, products, services and organization. Getting on the first page of many long tail searches can be very effective.

See the anatomy of a long tail

The concept of the long tail as it relates to business was originally shared in the magazine Wired by Chris Anderson.

It then became a book!

Wikepedia explains the long tail concept like this, “The long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a ‘normal’ or Gaussian distribution. The term has gained popularity in recent times as a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy. ^{[1] [2]} Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8). ^[3]“

So where do you find information about searches? Google Keyword Toolbox. It’s here you can review searches nationally, locally. As you enter different phrases and keywords you will discover the number of people searching those exact words, phrases. Research long enough and you will gain powerful consumer insights.

As the example above illustrates the key to being found is to concisely define your solution and identify and align your content with long tail searches, with people looking for your solutions, content.

In the example above the word ‘men’s’ is added to shoes. We now have the terms ‘men’s shoes’ which is searched 673,00 times versus shoes which is searched 30 million times monthly. And since we are selling 3 types of men’s shoes; shoes alone is not an effective word for us to optimize and GAD we can’t afford it… so we will never rank for it with our tiny start-up budget.

So we keep refining our solutions and products using very specific words and looking for searches that are specific, not generic or general and aligned closely with who we are and what we offer.

Now as we refine our search we discover that the phrase ‘men’s running shoes’ is searched 22,000 times and ‘red nike shoes’ is searched 4,400 times. Both of these searches are aligned with our solution; red nike, men’s running shoes.

Now what? Well- if we want we can target these long tail searches and develop optimized content so that we will be found on the first page of these two long tail searches. Yes, we will write an article about our shoes one titled and optimized for ‘Men’s running shoes’ and the other titled and optimized for ‘red Nike shoes.’Optimization will include but not be limited to tagging photo’s and video with these keywords. Using a H1 tag ( think subhead) that matches the long tail search and placing the exact long tail search phrase in the copy of our article a couple times.

After spending time reviewing how our client and target is searching for our solutions and products we create a word map of the long tail phrases we want to win.

A long tail search map?

Here’s an example of a long tail map I’m using on a project- not related to shoes! These are all the long tail searches my client has identified they want to win. The long tail map becomes the content organizer for the blog.

Long tail searches. Be found around the words that matter to you!

Pam Hoelzle

Integrated Marketing