Since folks are angling a bit for some hardcore SEO knowledge, I thought I'd take a stab at the thorny and often unproductive process of researching keywords in the long tail. The tail of search queries in a given industry is typically not visible via any of the major KW research programs or search engine ad databases (Overture, Google, MSN). In these instances, there is a research method to find those terms that can carry value, but it requires either a good amount of legwork or a talented programmer.
Process for Finding Long Tail Terms:
- Extract the top 10-50 most common search phrases at the head of the curve from your existing KW research in the industry
- Search Google, Yahoo! and MSN for each term
- For each page in the top 10-30 results, extract the usable text on the page
- Remove stopwords and filter by phrase size
- Remove instances of terms/phrases already in your KW research databse
- Sort through the most common remnants first, and comb as far down as you feel is valuable
Through this process, you're basically text mining relevant documents on the subect of your industry/service/product for terms that, while they may not have high search volume, have a reasonable degree of relation. Obviously, it's imperative to have human eyes reviewing the extracted data, but it's hard to find better source material for long tail targeting. You may even find additional terms at the head of the keyword curve.
How can this method be expanded upon?
- Use Technorati or Del.icio.us for your results (MSN and Ask, too)
- Use documents purely from specific types of results - local, academic, etc.
- Mine forum threads on your subject matter - you could even use inurl:forum(s) in the searches to grab conversational keywords
There's nothing uber-secretive about this methodology, but it is highly effective. The return on this research has a direct relationship to the amount of effort you expend (and how far you dig).
Any other suggestions/ideas for long tail term mining?
Here's a nice tool to explore the Long Tail of search for your existing pages: https://103bees.com I use it to extract terms and write optimized content for them.
Easy. Create a separate spam site on your "seed words" and watch your referers in your statistics program of choice. You can not only capture great keywords this way, but you can easily determine which words are prime for the picking (non-competetive). Read "Black Hat Strategies for White Hat Companies" here https://www.thegooglecache.com/?p=8
For example, if you create a scraper site on 10 "seed words" (lets say mortgage terms), you will probably have ~1000 unique keywords scraped from Overture, all searched at least 25 times a month. Each of those pages are filled with search results etc. Chances are, most of your visitors will not be searching for one of these keywords directly but will rather find you through one of those scraped keywords + tail word. So, instead of south carolina mortgage refinancing, you will get a searcher with south carolina mortgage refinancing cheap or something of that matter.
Stop trying to catch flies with chopsticks, start using fly paper.
And then of course...rjonesx suggests a great easier way to do this.
BTW...I started looking at others spam sites...and picked up some of their phrases.
Good comments!!!!
Nice post Rand - As a newer member I've started going back over older posts to gain further education and I honestly didn't know anything about long tail until recently.
This was one of the articles, along with a post by Identity that got me interested.
Since then, I've created a blog post focusing on what I've learnt and have referenced this article.
Keep up the great work!
My only concern is... so you have all these top used keywords in a list, then go mining for zillions of long tail keywords... okay, now you have an even bigger list... So WHERE do you stick all these keywords into the site? You create content around these keywords? Or try to shove them into existing content? Just seems like it could get you into trouble with Google for keyword stuffing...
To find relevant long tail keywords and search phrases with good search volume, you can try my free Long Tail Keyword Tool on v-seo.com
Personally, I've found that informal blogging on a topic can also lead to more longtail search terms than I would have originally realized, even if I did the keyword research that you suggest. I guess writing informally about a topic leads to looser use of language and is probably closer to how people think when they are searching for something.
Nice post and topic Rand. I've spent a lot of hours on this topic for my business's site. The business is local so the effective long tail phrases are combinations of local/regional/state/city/town words with industry phrasses. Conversions tend to be primarily long tail and are combinations of industry and regional terms.
It is one thing to work on the long tail when you are starting a site.
In that regard, the many steps you suggest are pretty time consuming in my estimation. Get the long tail phrases up from the keyword tools that seem to make sense and watch what happens.
Once the site is up and you start accumulating data, keep working on the long tail phrases along the lines you suggest.
In that regard, ultimately one needs to look at visits and conversions. With a long tail site, I strongly suggest categorizing types of phrases that tend to make sense. Categorizing is subject to each site.
Visiting forums is a great way to pull phraseology out of conversation/posts. It may highlight more often used terms.
As long as you are looking at the long tail...also look at the bls that deliver traffic. I've found for my business site that relevant bls show aggregate conversions roughly equal to conversions from msn. MSN delivers about 10% of my search traffic...so that is an important source as are the various keyword phrases within the long tail.
On top of what you suggested I'd say learn the topic/industry intimately. Do it through forums as Rand suggested or speak with experts/owners/sales people within the industry. They understand the motivational drives that move people into the topic.
While I know this business intimately we started with a site that is representative of others in the industry. We all compete for the same package of keywords. More recently, I grabbed at something I saw written by Ruud at cre8asite that focused on understanding what users/consumers/customers want. We went back to our understanding of the motivation that drives people to our business, added content and articles and are picking up long tail phrases that work...and where we don't have competition.
Long tail....means long work.
Dave
Rand, how about the thesaurus... also slang and ignorant usages? More traffic there sometimes.
Rand, this is a good post for those just venturing into new territory and I'll bet lots of people will be working on new longtail projects by this afternoon. I generally find that mining forums offers some pretty interesting and useable results.
Egol is right on the money with slang too, which will often lead to a new set of data. A nice extra set of terms can also come from the misspelling of the regular and slang terms as well.
Now you can serve Googlebot some ugly pages using misspelled words and poor grammar.
Ooops... Did I just say that?
90% of the keyword referrals from search engines to my sites are not in any of the keyword tools. I have read that half of Google's searches are unique on a daily basis. Is that true?
SEOBook.com has a good keyword mashup tool that you can use with Google's associated keywords to create lists of combinations of keywords together.