Targeting The Long Tail In Google Local Search w/ Keyword Research

[Linda Buquet]

Chris Silver Smith just offered up a nice Christmas treat over at Search Engine Land, so I wanted to share it here too.

Use Google Keyword Research To Target The Long Tail In Local Search

There?s something of a void where local business marketing is concerned. Local marketers understand they need to target keyword queries in SEO and PPC campaigns, but they assume they know what people search for, and they miss out on valuable referrals because of it. Here?s a brief guide on local keyword research to close the gap.

Companies tend to get somewhat myopic about understanding how consumers try to discover their type of business...

For most sites and businesses, the most popular keyword terms may indeed have a much larger number of searches associated with them, but the combined number of searches from all the other various search queries could easily dwarf that of the top few keywords. This statistical distribution concept has been described as the ?long tail? ? the ?head? terms may have strikingly large quantities of searches, but adding up all the lesser ?tail? terms can be far greater.

What do you think?

 

[MichaelJ]

This is an excellent guide that applies to much more than long tail keywords.

 

[Dave]

That article is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO on target. I can't emphasize that enough.

Chris' methods for researching alternatives to the main phrases are excellent. There are endless other alternatives.

The ironic thing today is that to a certain level in local search today if you are successful in this endeavor you may well see the impact in total traffic, but you won't see the specifics as most of it will be reported as "not provided".

I went back to pre "not provided" days to look at some traffic for one of our sites. The site has and had dominant #1 organic and dominant #1 pac positions for the 2 major phrases in the region (we run comprehensive adwords to assess impressions).

3 keyword phrases dominated traffic for the site: the #1 and #2 phrases and a branded name phrase.

they contributed 25% of keyword traffic. That means 75% came in on the long tail. Virtually all of those phrases contributed less than 1% of keyword traffic.

We looked at leads via keywords. The 3 top phrases again contributed 25% of form leads. Again the long tail contributed 75% of leads as it did traffic.

There is gold in them long tail phrases.

Chris' article is a gem.