Long and Short of Long Tail Research

Posted on February 9, 2007
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization |

With Yahoo publically announcing that it won’t support it’s Overture Keyword Inventory tool I’ve been mucking about with other tools to replace it. I like the Wordtracker keyword tool maybe just because I tend to trust Wordtracker more than some other sources. They’ve been around for quite some time and my real world experience chasing keyword is that they are as close as anyone in extrapolating likely search volumes for different keyword phrases.

BUT, I tend to trust keyword prediction tools more on the larger phrases than I do on the lower queried phrases. That’s just due to the likelihood that the smaller the forecasted traffic, the greater the degree of distortion when small samples are extrapolated over the universe of huge traffic. If that didn’t make sense to you think about the millions of search phrases typed in over many search engines. If the keyword tool is getting its sample from one or two sources and that sample is relatively small compared to the total actual search volume across all search engines, then the chance of under or over estimating search queries goes up dramatically the fewer times a keyword phrase is included in the sample used for projection.

If you get what I just said and agree with it, then does the current focus on long tail keyword research have any merit?

Maybe.

Well, maybe that’s better put as…

Sometimes.

Here’s the thing. I see a lot of folks getting all excited about long tail keyword search because with the current environment with Google, it’s getting darn hard to get rankings on higher volume keyword phrases. So touting the importance of long tail keyword search gives the SEO and SEM GURUS something to talk about. Something doable that should bring results to all of us slugging it out in the real world. And they’ll tell you that not only is it important, those long tail keywords will convert better than the high volume ones.

Here’s where my real world experience says ‘Just wait a minute, buster!’

Let’s say we are committed to making our fortunes with long tail phrases. Which ones do we pursue? If there is a huge margin of query error associated with these, then spending too much time on any one phrase means we may make a mistake. Worse yet, we don’t know how hard any of these phrases are to rank on.

Case in point…

I set up a page on my website to go after the phrase ‘chocolate golf balls’. Turns out even though the Wordtracker tool currently projects only about 15 queries a day, a lot of folks out there sell chocolate and have chocolate golf balls for sale. So my page only ranks well on MSN and not so hot on Google and Yahoo.

If I had spent significant time on it, maybe I’d do better but how much time do you spend on a term that at best gets you 15 folks a day? For me, not much.

On the other hand, your site will just get rankings on phrases you never thought of. For me, the term ‘golf and chocolate’ wasn’t something I thought about. Doesn’t even show up in the Wordtracker tool but I have top listing in Google and MSN (only #10 on Yahoo) but got some real traffic from it.

So use a good tool like Wordtracker but don’t spend too much time on any small traffic phrase. Save your energies to go after the bigger phrases.
Would you have expected any different advice from the gal who likes to slay giants?

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