What is a Long-Tail Search?
You may have heard this term in ActiveRain webinars or blogs around ActiveRain or the web but just not sure what it means or how it applies to you.
(This is following up my previous post of Instant SEO)
Numbers don't mean much when you're talking hits on your website anymore. It's the conversion rate that really matters. How many of those visitors stayed on your site longer than one second? So what if you had 10,000 visitors last month if your bounce rate is 99%? (BOUNCE rate is the rate at which a visitor clicks away from the page immediately.)
What you want is a LOW bounce rate with some serious visitors. This is where "long-tail" searches can really come in handy. What is a long-tail search? The longer, more detailed search phrase that someone might search for. There may be a million people and sites that search for or use the terms "Oregon Real Estate" but there may be just a few that really need to find a "La Grande Oregon Realtor or real estate agent". These are the detailed searches that can get you an actual lead rather than a click and a no-show.
I bet you have searched for some pretty specific things and you may have found a site with that exact phrase as the title. This is because you want to narrow down your search to the exact topic you are looking for. You don't want 18 million sites on something you really weren't looking for - remember Bing's commercial... "What has search overload done to us?"
So how do you do this?
BLOGS
- When you're blogging, here or anywhere you want to make sure you title your blog appropriately. Don't keyword stuff it with garble but make it be the exact thing your blog is about (IF you want to get found thas is. Playful blogs can have catchy titles if you don't care about the search engines) Then make sure you highlight those keyword terms or phrases in the blog itself so the search engine can look through and see, "OH, this really IS what this blog is about".
STATIC PAGES
- Yes, Static pages are still getting found but sometimes not as fast as blog posts. But don't let that get you down. If you title your pages correctly (even the meta data - title, keyword, & description) then search engines will be more likely to display your site when that topic is searched for.
URL's
- Do URL's matter? Meaning does this URL: http://www.beeberanch.net/lotsforsale mean more to the search engines than this: http://www.beeberanch.net/%%page1432%pagedefault.url%manager
YES. Search engines like to see the pages actual title in the URL if possible. If your webmaster or site currently doesn't do this, I would suggest asking for it. It can make a difference.
So, do long-tail searches matter? Absolutely! Put them to work for you. Title your pages and blogs appropriately. Get specific and get those search engines to find you!
Here are some great examples of long-tail search pages that get results:
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