Targeting your niches main key phrases is of course prudent and can drive both high levels of traffic, conversions, all important brand awareness and perceived authority from the consumer. Many of our clients position for their industries main key phrases and are reaping the rewards. The reality is however, that due to the competitive nature of the search rankings and the non-budgetary factors considered such as age of domain, domain authority and some of the larger phrases being investigatory or research phrases often the real success can lie in combining these high level phrases with long tail targeting (LTT).

The Facts

• Long tail key phrases can drive more traffic when built over time.
• Traffic is available from hundreds/thousands of phrases that the competition are missing.
• The longer the key phrase the more convertible it can be.
• Well written, key phrase rich content attracts and keeps visitors.

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Defining long tail key phrases

They are exactly as the name would suggest – longer key phrases, so "hotel Manchester" for example becomes "hotel Manchester with parking or hotel Manchester with parking and Wi-Fi".

The reality being that the longer and more specific the search query the closer to the point of purchase / action the searcher becomes. In this example the first search has proved only mildly effective and thus a new string has been entered - upon finding the relevant result the percentage chance of conversion increases sharply.

The Proof is in the Long tail!

In the case study below from a live client we see that traffic is being driven to the site from over 35,000 different key phrases. Please note that this is search traffic ONLY and not pay per click.

The Search Marketing Group – Ready, Qualified and Able...

As members of our research and analytics team are fully and formally Google analytics qualified, they have mastered the art of interrogating both the analytics of a site and the suite of proprietary software that we have here at the Search Marketing Group. We take the following steps to ensure success...

Identify which phrases suit your industry and your website via several routes

• Your sites analytics.
• The data that we can call from Googles programming interface such as search volumes, pay per click bids and specific traffic by region (among many other factors).
• Identifying which sites are currently competing, and allocating an SMG difficulty score for each key phrase in SPECIFIC relation to your site. IE the client versus the competition.
• Analysing, via Google's programming interface (www.code.google.com) the levels of content on your site having been accepted by google for a specific phrase.

Steps from here...

We regularly see sites who’s content could be improved to attract more visitors so the first thing to do is to conduct an audit and be making the most of the content that you have, underutilised content is one of the biggest draws on a site and lowers the sites ability to compete and convert significantly.

Our in house copywriters identify a targeted and project managed campaign to cover significant quantities of long tail key phrases over the length of a project. High quality, intelligent content is then written with the correct tags and meta content description and then either given to the client to upload or uploaded by our design team.

We can also help, if desired, in the resubmitting of site maps and monitoring of webmaster tools.