Should I Optimise For Long Tail Searches?

What Is Long Tail Search?

Long tail search is basically when you search for more of a phrase or a question as opposed to a single word or words. There are a couple of different examples of long tail traffic and two different ways to optimise for it.

The first example would be, ‘Punto Head Gasket’, this is an item people may want to buy. its something you would optimise your punto head gasket page for. A long tail search for this keyword could be ‘Why is my Punto’s head gasket always broke?’ This isn’t something a website owner would intentionally optimise for but if you own a Fiat Punto it is a question you are likely to ask!

The second example of Long Tail could be the keyword ‘Fancy Dress’. This is a competitive phrase which would be hard to get listings for without a long term strategy, however ‘men’s pirate fancy dress’ is much less competitive and by choosing a more long tail phrase it would be achievable sooner.

How Do I Do Long Tail?

As i mentioned there are two different methods to optimising your site for long tail searches. The first method is ensuring you follow basic SEO principles, optimising your inner pages correctly could cater for your long tail searches. Ensure you have your internal linking set up correctly, is your men’s pirate fancy dress page called men’s-pirate-fancy-dress.html? Is the main title on the page ‘pirate’ or is it ‘men’s pirate fancy dress?’ Have you get your phrase in the meta title? Finally has the page got content? many ecommerce stores are mainly built up from images. Adding content to the page will give Google something to crawl and rank the page for. If you build your website with this in mind then you will find that your website will start to rank higher for the more specific ‘long tail’ searches.

The second type of long tail traffic you can capture is the more question like searches ‘Why is my Punto’s head gasket always broke?’ To capture this traffic you need something like a blog or a forum. When you write a blog post or a forum post then it is usually written in the style of asking a question. The search term above could be someone looking for advice in a forum.

As you can see from the search result for this search term, the first result is a forum, they haven’t intentionally optimised for this search term but they rank for it.

I would recommend adding a forum to your website only if you already have a lot of traffic, Getting a forum up and running with people using it isn’t as easy as it sounds. If you do have the traffic though then you may find it a little easier and straight away you will have users giving you free content.

If you don’t have large volumes of traffic then you could install and use a blog. You will need to add the content yourself but you can control what the content is and with a little bit of thought and research you can easily choose topics that may attract long tail search.

Keep checking your rankings, if you find that some of your pages have stalled then take a look why, take a look at why the competition is still above you. It may be down to links so then you will have to do some link building on your inner pages. The chances are for long tail searches you wont need very many links to gain rankings.

Does Long Tail Actually Work?

in a ?word.. YES! From my example above you can see that a forum is ranking top, Head gaskets on a fiat punto are problematic so the chances are there will be people searching for things like this.

If you need a second example of a website dominating long tail searches then just take a look at position two for the search above. Yahoo answers has become the Wikipedia of the long tail search results, its everywhere! Yahoo have set up a service that for users is great, its an open opportunity for people to ask questions. It has also gained them an unimaginable amount of extra traffic and from Yahoo’s point of view it means more money, every Yahoo answers page has advertising on it.

The question now is can you really afford not to take your long tail opportunities into account? SEO can take time but by assigning some time to your long tail search efforts you can start to pull in users before your main keywords get their listings.

Gary Douglas
SEO Project Manager