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This is a guest post by Dee Barizo of The Best Degrees
In affiliate marketing, you can leverage long tail keywords in your SEO strategy and greatly increase traffic and sales. In this article, I’ll define the term long tail keyword, the benefits of focusing on these keywords and how to target them.
What is a long tail keyword?
Long tail keyword is an SEO term based on Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail. In this book, he described two different distribution models for businesses, blockbuster and long tail. The blockbuster model is one that most people are already familiar with and naturally inclined to mimic. In this model, a company derives most of its sales from a few products.
The blockbuster model was necessary due to the distribution and inventory costs associated with having many different products. Each additional product added a significant cost to have it on the shelf and distribute it, so businesses were attracted to smaller product lines. They pumped their resources into developing a few bestsellers instead of greatly expanding their product line.
Think of a movie studio that only creates a few movies a year but spends a lot of money on each movie in hopes that it will become a huge hit. In this example, movie studios don’t have to worry about shelf space but they are limited in distribution channels (number of movie theaters and showings per theater).
But recently, the development of the online marketplace and the mainstream acceptance of online shopping has made it possible to offer a truly vast array of products at minimal cost. Online businesses do not need to worry about shelf space. They can store their products at low cost locations since they are not bound to a local marketplace. Also, the online marketplace is global, so the supply of potential customers is exponentially larger than before. This allows an online business to profitably stock many low demand products.
Companies like Amazon and Netflix have been successful at selling a large number of relatively obscure products in low volumes as opposed to a few products in high volumes. The total sales of these niche products was dubbed the long tail by Anderson because of the appearance of the sales volume on the sales chart. Here is the chart he used.
The SEO community uses the term to define the keywords that don’t have much traffic. These keywords usually contain four words or more such as real estate el paso texas low mortgage. In aggregate, they comprise of much of the daily search volume. Conversely, the blockbuster keywords like credit cards and real estate are called short tail keywords.
Long Tail Keywords are Better Than Short Tail Keywords
Savvy affiliate marketers are targeting long tail keywords (LTKs) over short tail keywords (STKs) for various reasons. Here are some of the main ones.
There is less competition for LTKs, so they are easier to rank for. STKs have more competition for four reasons.
1. STKs draw many webmasters and site owners because intuitively they know those keywords have more traffic than LTKs.
2. LTKs by nature are more obscure than STKs.
3. Most web publishers are not knowledgable enough in SEO to understand the value of LTKs. Even if they learn more about SEO, they may start using keyword tools but the popular keyword tools tend to showcase STKs over LTKs.
4. Targeting LTKs will usually put you in competition with STKs since LTKs tend to include STKs. For example, if a site is trying to rank for red sports car used corvette, it will be part of the competition for sports car.
Aside from the higher competition, Google’s algorithm makes it much harder to rank for STKs than LTKs. As Aaron Wall shows through these helpful graphics, links play a much more important part for STKs while onpage elements are more important for LTKs.
To rank for STKs, you need a huge amount of backlinks, many of which need to come from popular sites. Link building is time consuming so it can take months and even years to rank. Plus, even with all your effort, you may not have the resources and skill to beat out the top sites. Because of Google’s emphasis on links, the top ten sites for STKs tend to be big brands with a lot of resources. These brands are hard to compete with!
Spending all that time without much result drains resources and hurts morale. STKs can have a certain appeal if you like high risk/high reward opportunities. There is a big payoff if you hit your goal, but the likelihood of that is low.
On the other hand, you usually don’t need many links to rank for LTKs and you can rank for them fairly quickly. This leads to a positive domino effect. You get traffic quickly from the rankings. The traffic gives you visibility, which can lead to freely given links. These new links improve your rankings so you get even more traffic. Each increase in traffic gives you opportunities to make more money and you can reinvest the earnings to improve your site.
LTKs may have lower competition but that doesn’t mean they don’t comprise a sizable percentage of the search traffic volume. Consider these two stats from bg Theory: 20% of Google’s daily searches are new or haven’t been used in the last 6 months and 54.5% of the queries are greater than 3 words.
Also, in my experience, sites get the bulk of their traffic from LTKs. As a quick experiment, I checked out that stats of some of my sites from various niches to see the ratio between search traffic and number of keywords. Here is what I found from this year’s stats.
Site #1 (gaming niche): 279,169 visits / 72,754 keywords = 3.84 visits per keyword
Site #2 (dating niche): 122,851 / 47,501 = 2.59
Site #3 (computer tips niche): 103,343 / 53,265 = 1.94
Site #4 (fashion niche): 38,631 / 15,350 = 2.52
Site #5 (software niche): 130,737 / 32,987 = 3.96
As you can see, none of the sites reached four visits per keyword. So, on average, each keyword that delivers traffic doesn’t send a lot of traffic at all. For every keyword that sends 100+ visits each month, you will have many LTKs that only send one or two visits. But when you total up the traffic from those LTKs, you come up with a good chunk of your total search volume.
Check your stats program to see if you have similar ratios and leave a comment with your results. I predict you will have similar ratios as my sites.
Targeting LTKs over STKs improves your conversion rate. A searcher who types in a LTK is more likely to buy than a consumer who uses a more general term. Without knowing anything about me, if I walked into your shop and said, “I want to buy a pair of tennis shoes,” would you think I was interested in buying, or just casually browsing. Now, what if I walked in and said, “Do you have those white silver Nike tennis shoes, the ones Roger Federer wears?” You would know that the only thing left would be size and pricing. If you had what I wanted, I would purchase a pair as long as it fit my budget.
Now, if I came into a brick-and-mortar store mumbling about tennis shoes, the retailer will ask a few questions in order to push the sales process forward. But online, the store owner cannot do that. The online consumer is in control of the buying process and will often browse a number of websites, considering a range of products, before figuring out which product they want and who they want to buy it from. By targeting LTKs, you position your site near the end of the buying process, when customers are in a purchasing state of mind and already know what they want.
On the other hand, STKs can have such poor conversion rates that they may not be worth targeting at all. I remember listening to a podcast of an SEO firm that ranked for seo marketing. They stopped aiming for that term because the conversion rate was so low.
Here’s a graph that shows the relationship between conversion rate and the different types of keywords:
Finally, just because your SEO strategy is focused on LTKs doesn’t mean you won’t improve your rankings for STKs. As I’ve shown before, most LTKs contain STKs. For instance, if you aim for golden retriever dog training puppy, you are also sending signals to Google to improve your ranking for golden retriever and dog training.
How to Target Long Tail Keywords
Now that we’ve seen the benefits of targeting LTKs, let’s look at some practical strategies for improving your rankings for these keywords.
First things first. Don’t target LTKs one at a time. This is a not a good strategy for your time and effort. Remember that you need to rank for many LTKs to bring in a lot of traffic. Fortunately, you can target many keywords at the same time with one page. The key is building a large keyword list. Then, refer to that list and include the relevant keywords in your content.
There are different things you can do to generate an effective keyword list. Here are my favorite strategies.
Perform in-depth market research through social media. One of my favorite SEO quotes is “Keyword research is market research.” Social media is a great channel to do keyword research because you can get feedback from many different people.
Examine Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, and the popular blogs and forums in your industry. Record all the topics that keep coming up in the online conversation. Then, for each topic, record the keywords that people are using to describe the topic. I like to organize my keywords by topic to make it easier to keep track of them. Each niche has a certain vocabulary and jargon. It’s your job to become familiar with those words. Those same words will be used by web searchers on Google.
Research your competitors. Find out which topics they are covering and which ones they are neglecting. They may be ignoring topics that show up a lot in social media. By creating content on these topics using relevant keywords, you’ll target valuable keywords with low competition. Not only that, but you’ll gain branding and credibility by standing out from the crowd.
A similar strategy is to examine the title tags of your competitors and see which keywords are not being used. The title tag is by far the most important onpage SEO factor. You can gain a big advantage by including the keywords in your title tags that aren’t being used by your competitors.
Check your logs. If you have a lot of content, your keyword logs are often a gold mine. Find out which keywords are sending traffic to your site and create content based on those keywords. In many cases, your logs will point to an area in your niche where there is much opportunity.
For example, if you have a gardening website and your logs show many keywords related to gardening tools, you can start blogging about all the tools you know. Then you could do research about tools and blog about the ones you haven’t covered. I used this strategy on my gaming site to good effect. In my logs, I found many keywords in a topic that I didn’t write much about. I started covering the topic and after a couple months, my search traffic more than doubled.
A more advanced strategy is use a tool like SEMRush to spy on your competitors and see which keywords they are ranking for.
Use trial and error. Expand your vocabulary and include many different keywords on your site. Take some time to brainstorm many synonyms for common terms in your niche. Try them out when you create new content. Then, reexamine your logs to see which ones were effective and add them to the keyword list.
Don’t be afraid of meaty articles. Some affiliate marketers seem to stay away from longer content. However, in my experience, articles over 800 words tend to rank for more LTKs than shorter articles.
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About the Author: Dee Barizo is an SEO specialist for The Best Degrees, an online degree site featuring the top online programs based on cost and quality. The site recently published a ranking of the best distance learning schools in the United States.
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