SEO’s (and SEM’s) Long Tail
A recent jobsite analysis looked at stats and shows us that search (google, yahoo, msn, etc) sent more than 612 thousand total visits via 226,470 keywords.
That’s profound. Users found the site using 226 thousand different keywords.
That’s the nature of users. They simply don’t fall into just a few select keywords, like the obvious jobs, work, job board, or employment. What we’re talking about here is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to our web site from search engines. It’s not, necessarily, the effort of focusing in of a few select keywords. It’s also a marketing effort where we chase the ‘long tail’, and SEO (and SEM, or Search Engine Marketing) is a great example of “long tail marketing”.
I’m obsessed with metrics and analytics, and there’s some interesting things happening here. I’ll give some examples. The site got lots of traffic from people keying the single word “jobs”. But that’s not the complete story. When a person finds the site using the word “jobs”, how long do they stay on the site? How many pages do they visit on average? Important to know for ALL inbound keywords (yes, all 226 thousand of them) because it gives us a clue into the “good” keywords (those that drive lots of traffic) and “bad” keywords (those that only drive a little traffic). To paint another example, people came to the site from the keyword “Air Canada jobs”, but because the site has no jobs from air Canada, they quickly left unfulfilled (not spending much time, or viewing many pages). So, it’s not a quality keyword, even though it has the word jobs in it. Other keywords, “find brampton unemployment news” for example, gave the site users viewing an average of 155 pages, and spending close to an hour on the site. Who do we chase after? Hopefully the answer is easy. The answer is far more complex, however, than simply looking at the few obvious keywords.
Also, it’s very important to understand that search engines are becoming more and more localized. Google, for example has had national versions of search (google.ca vs google.co.uk) for a long time. It’s because they “localize” the results. When in the UK, I’ll find different results when searching for “jobs” than I will while in Canada. Well, it’s only a matter of time before the search engines localize further (to the city? to the province?). Someone sitting in Vancouver might get different results than someone in Halifax. For a site that has lots of jobs in Vancouver and none in Halifax, it’s reasonable to expect that the site should show higher in Vancouver than in Halifax because it’s more relevant and useful. In fact, I think it might already be happening on Google. That’s important for us to understand, because it means when we look at search, it might show different results for us than for others. Google is beginning to customize based on YOUR personal history too, so two people searching the same word sitting next to each other, might in fact show different results.
It means that it’s important for us NOT to judge our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effectiveness in search by looking at search! (the same holds true for Search Engine Marketing, or SEM paid keywords). The only way to really look at our effectiveness is by looking at our inbound traffic and the analytics. The fact remains for the jobsite was well over 1/3rd of all traffic was coming from Search Engines (orgainic listings, not paid search), proving that it’s being found, and seen, and clicked on. There’s always room to grow and get better, but I don’t think it’s wise change or optimize only for a few select words. We’ll get far better traffic trying to get traffic from other less obvious keywords (the long tail).
Food for thought:
Thanks, Mike. I love to hear about my awesomeness and totally correctness. Good for the ego.
Awesome article and totally correct! When people are working on optimization of their site (especially an existing one), they too often get caught up in keyword research and looking for what general users are looking for in a wide scope.
It should start with your own site, researching both how people are ‘currently’ finding you, as well as developing a profile for who your visitors are – via your analytics.
I find that looking at my long tail searches also give me more ideas for future articles.
~mike