Retail SEO - targetting the 'long tail'
Optimising for 'long tail' keyphrases and why you need to do it.
Trading online is all about getting your products in front of as many potential buyers as possible who are both willing and able to buy from you. Intelligent Retail enable their customers to achieve this aim with a structured and well thought out website promotion programme utilising a mix of traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media marketing which bolsters the already excellent product level results achievable by the Intelligent Retail 'Connect' e-commerce software system.
So what, you are asking is the title of this post all about? Well, the SEO community has talked for years about the benefits of targetting longer, more focussed keyphrases when promoting websites, the simple facts are (backed by years of data from both organic listings in the search engines and also from Pay Per Click listings in systems such as Google's own AdWords programme) that longer tail phrases convert much better into sales than shorter phrases from a search.
So what is a long tail phrase?
A long tail phrase equates to a search phrase which has 3 or more words in that phrase, for example, the phrase 'artificial black christmas tree' might be regarded as a long tail phrase, whereas the phrase 'christmas tree' would be a short tail phrase.
Long tail phrases are better then?
From Google's own data, 20% - 25% of all searches are totally unique, that is they have never been searched for before! These unique phrases tend to be very long tail (5 and more keywords in the phrase), so at least 20% of all search traffic in the search engines consists of longer tail keyphrases.
Now, nobody is suggesting that if you get to the first result in Google for a specific short tail phrase like 'denim jeans' you won't get lots of traffic, but trophy phrases such as these are only part of the answer.
To get a real chance of gaining large amounts of targetted traffic to your website, you should be trying to attain a broad range of long tail keywords coming up in the Google results which are very relevant to your products or services.
From research done into e-commerce trends over the years we can clearly see that broader, more general search queries happen earlier in the search process, so you have less of a chance of converting a broad or short tail search into an actual sale. Long tail or less general search phrases however happen later in the search process when buying online, so the customer is much closer to actually making a purchase.
Research data from Intelligent Retail's own research points towards people using longer and much more specific search queries to find what they are looking for... as in most things, you get the best answers if you ask the right questions!
Other reasons for choosing long tail optimisation
Short tail target terms are harder to attain (because of increased competition for those phrases) and because of this return on investment is much lower for short tail phrases - more competition (from other websites) means that more time is spent trying to attain high placement in search engine results for the promoted website and time, as we all know equates very strongly to money.
If you look at your web analytics account, you will see that maybe 50 or 100 keywords bring 90+% of all your traffic for most websites, the rest of the traffic being brought by the remaining very specific long tail phrases - the way to leverage large increases in targetted traffic is to vastly increase the amount of long tail phrases which your website appears for in search results.
Because long tail, targetted search phrases convert to sales much better than short tail phrases, this mass increase in long tail coverage in the search engines which are relevant to the products you sell via your website can lead quite quicky to dramatic increases in sales.
But I still want to be top for my 'trophy phrases'
Here at Intelligent Retail, we get asked frequently to optimise websites for very short tail phrases which show very large amounts of monthly search traffic, have incredibly large amounts of competing websites and will take large amounts of time and effort to attain. Can we gain first page placement for these 'trophy phrases'? Yes we can... no problem there! BUT (and it's a big BUT!), we always advise on targetting longer tail phrases alongside these trophy phrases if only to provide targetted traffic whilst waiting for the optimisation and marketing efforts to 'kick in' for these short tail 'trophy' phrases.
As always, optimisation is a balance and you get out what you put in. The end goal for your e-commerce website is to sell products, not to appear in the Google results for any particular phrase, so target those longer tail phrases intelligently and prosper with Intelligent Retail.