Increase Your Traffic with Long Tail SEO

It is important when working on your SEO that you include the long-tail method of SEO into your strategy and not just focus all your attention on the home page keywords. This is a common mistake that many people fall into when working to get their website to the top positions in google.

Research has identified that for an average site that is optimised with the long tail method as well as homepage keywords (via blogs and articles for example), the home page draws in less than half of the traffic. This is because the site is being found through other keyword variations which Google are relating to the site.

The rest of the website then, is responsible for more than half of the entry to the site so its important that these pages are optimised too, so they can maximise the traffic that you receive to your site. If this is completed correctly then your website’s high ranking presence across the search engines will be maximised and will improve the level of visitors to your site.

The long tail method of SEO involves you taking your main keywords and using a keyword tool, you would then search that keyword and discover the variations or long tail versions that contain your keyword that people do type into to Google to find the service or product you are offering. An example of this is if your keyword was “marquees” you would find in your keyword tool that people type in “wedding marquees for hire” a longer version that is more specific and less competitive. If optimised correctly this will most likely rank highly. People who do search these long tail terms know more what they want and are more likely to convert to sales.

Using these long tail versions of your keywords as new pages of content within your site will open your potential visitors’ scope for finding you in Google much wider. By using these long-tailed versions of your keywords as blog titles and article titles and optimising each of these new pages with good keyword distribution, meta tags, alt tags and links etc your site will most likely perform on page 1 for these keywords much easier as the competitiveness is very low for most long tail terms.

Getting the maximum volume of traffic to your site is a very important part of your internet marketing campaign and even though conversions are important to your website, without visits there will be no conversions!

After the main website is built using the best SEO techniques and you have added extra keywords to your other pages you can then, using these main keywords periodically, add content to your site via the articles or blogs as mentioned before.

Gearing all of your additional content to everything around these keywords will bring a variation of content of the main subject from your website enabling you to capture the interest of potential customers in many different sometimes more informal methods. As these pages account for much of the entry to your website and they contain you main keyword anyway then you are opening the umbrella of opportunity for your websites visitors much wider which can only enhance the benefits to your SEO.

Benefits of PPC and SEO

When looking to promote your website with Internet marketing you may feel confused about whether Pay Per Cick (PPC) advertising or Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the right path to take to get visitors to your site and to maximise your sales conversions.

Both methods have certain benefits but you need to be clear on what benefits you can expect to receive from each aspect.

Pay Per Click

The clear advantages of PPC where you are essentially bidding for your position using certain keywords are as follows:

• Instant traffic to your website whilst your daily bidding budget lasts.
• Sales being generated quickly and easily
• You can test the effectiveness of your chosen keywords and see what conversions they bring to your website.
• It’s a quick and easy way to judge what keywords are more suitable for your website and industry to bring the conversions you want.
• You are in control of what cash limit per day you set to spend.
• PPC is easier for business owners to understand than SEO.

SEO

The impact that a long term SEO campaign will bring to your website and business are:

• Organic SEO is the natural way to get your site onto page 1 and once your site is there, as long as your SEO work is maintained then you will say on page 1 with permanent top level advertising.
• You receive as many visitors as possible at no additional cost to you.
• The natural search results are clicked more frequently by searchers than the AdWords listings so there is more potential visitors that will come to your listing.
• Ultimately for a campaign that requires long term success and that will be a continued means of advertising for a business then Organic SEO is certainly the way forward to ensure that you get a long term better return on your investment.
• SEO requires bringing each website’s architecture up to a certain standard and building good links across the Internet and ensuring the content within the site is optimised to a high standard.

Many people who want fast results and maybe don’t understand the full workings of SEO would opt to have just pay per click as the cost /result ratio is something they can see easily from the start yet with SEO patience and trust is needed for the interim whilst they wait for the continued SEO work to make the keywords perform.

However companies that use just PPC ultimately end up spending more money as it has no long term advantages the high cost to get clients will always continue and to get more visitors the cost on PPC will need to increase. You will also be charged per click even if it doesn’t turn to a conversion and once your daily budget is reached your advert won’t appear until the next day meaning you could potentially miss out on visitors who perhaps would have converted to a sale.

How to use both PPC and SEO together

A wise strategy for those wishing for the fast results of PPC but the long term benefits of SEO is to start by having an initial joint campaign of both.

A period of PPC with Google AdWords at the start of a campaign as a short term strategy could help you assess your keyword choice before you get too far into your link building for your organic SEO. This will not only ensure that your keyword choices get the right kind of visitors, but it is an excellent resource when you integrate your AdWords into your Google Analytics to see which of your keywords produce the highest level of conversions for your business. The statistics you can get filtered into your Google Analytics will enable you to make detailed comparisons on a number of variables which will assist your planning and strategies for your long term SEO enabling you to gain quick insight into which keywords will give your website the most success in terms of conversions.

Implementing an initial combination of PPC and SEO is even more beneficial to Internet marketing campaigns that have competitive national keywords that will take several months to perform on page 1.

When your organic SEO campaign is successfully working you can simply stop your PPC and maintain your strong established SEO campaign with the knowledge that the keywords that bring you the best conversions are at the head of your strategy.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they start out on their first SEO campaign is that they don’t work out exactly what it is they want to achieve from the campaign. Being page 1 on Google is all very well, but if you target the wrong keywords for your site you will actually damage your site in the ‘eyes’ of Google.

You must get to know your client. Make sure you are all ‘on the same page’ in terms of what they hope to achieve from the campaign. Ask them what outcome they hope to get from their SEO campaign. It may be increased sales, increased enquiries, signing up for a newsletter or simply brand reaffirming by placing them first for their company name.

If your client has an eCommerce site it is worthwhile asking them which products have the highest margin, as targeting these directly will make the client the best ROI (Return on Investment). This approach also works well for targeting service providers (e.g. plumbers, electricians etc) as there may be a particular service that brings in more money than other services. For example a new boiler installation for a plumber would be better than fixing leaking taps.

Another thing to consider is regional specific SEO, something that the team here at Creare are particularly expert in. I often ask my clients which area they want to target first, as there are often add-on costs involved for the client if they have to service areas further away. Alternatively, they may know that certain areas have more of their target audience in, and therefore are better to ‘go for’.

The next thing to make sure your client is well aware of is the timescales involved with SEO. SEO is a time consuming process, and the first three months are often fraught with dangers, the client can’t see results because the listing hasn’t yet reached its desired position, and you feel under pressure to get the site performing asap. This is not the time to dip into black hat techniques though! Make sure you are transparent with your client as to what can be achieved in the timescale they are willing to work with. It may be a case of working on ‘easier’ keywords that will get them an ROI first before tackling the ‘tougher’ keywords that take time.

Remember, SEO is all about marketing your client, albeit through a search engine rather than ‘traditional’ means. Therefore, you must make sure that you client makes money. This is your ultimate job. Page 1 listings are fantastic, of course they are, but money in the bank for your client is what really makes the difference.

Use all the tools at your disposal, Google Analytics for example can tell you a lot about which keywords perform well, whether the pages targeted for those keywords are effective and ultimately whether you are going for the right keywords. Watch out for Rebecca’s articles on Google Analytics, and how to get the best from this fabulous tool.

Once you have a good relationship with your client, and this takes time, you will be in a unique position to be able to advise them as to where their online marketing should go next. If you are anything like me, you will genuinely want to help make your client money! I get a massive buzz when my clients report increased sales or enquiries.

If I have done the initial work in ensuring I am targeting the best keywords for their business then I know I will be on the right track once the site starts to perform. This is the key to a successful SEO campaign.

How to set up Custom Reports in Google Analytics

You’ve set up your Google Analytics account so you can monitor your Internet Marketing but with the minefield of information that GA offers do you wonder where to go past the default dash board that is already present there?

Too much data without a purpose or a function is worthless so its important for you to decide what it is from your analytics that you actually want to find out.

For your SEO purposes you most likely wish to know if the keywords you are optimising for are actually bringing the traffic to your site that you expect. You will want to know about which keywords have been directly responsible for your goal conversions. Other important things you may wish to know when measuring the success of your SEO is which areas your visitors come from especially for local SEO campaigns and for e-commerce websites you will need to know the average value that each area or keyword has actually brought.

There are many variables which you can play with in custom reports so consider which are important to you and which results will enable you to create actions to improve your business and your SEO.

The main essential set up that I use for my clients is the Keywords Goals Report. You can set this up in a simple custom report which collates this information into one simple report. To do this you need to click on the custom reports tab and click to create a new report.

Within this set up you need to set the metrics which are to be reported and the dimensions on which they are to be shown against.

Type the metrics you wish to use into the search bar and when found drag and drop them into the correct box. For the Keyword Goals Custom Report use the settings in the image below. With this report the goal 1 has been configured against people visiting the contact page and goal 2 is where people have submitted an email enquiry and reached the contact process page (thank you page).

You can rename this report at the top by simply editing the date section and calling it Keyword Goals.
Click to save and then you will see the full report you have created.

The sources will be listed showing how many contact and contact process conversions there are, along with the contact process conversion rate. You can now click on the source to reveal the keywords that were typed to find your site under each source which brought the contact and contact process goals.

You can customise your report to suit your needs and make multiple reports in any one account. The great thing about custom reports is that once set up you can access the information your business needs to know about the performance of your website and your SEO quickly and easily without having to know how to navigate around the whole of Google Analytics.

To see the selection of variables you can choose from you can scroll the side bar to make your selection on the metrics and dimensions

The example of how to see which cities have brought the most traffic and the value of each visit is demonstrated below.

Planning before creating your reports is essential to ensure you create the right kind of reports for your needs and to make analysing your SEO a much easier task.

It’s common knowledge there are multiple techniques and methods to work on and improve your SEO and that the techniques have been split into two camps; White Hat and Black Hat.

But what does the colour of a hat have to do with SEO? Well the coloured hats are metaphorical for good vs bad, or in other terms search engine approved and non search engine approved.

A SEO tactic is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines guidelines and involves no deception. Essentially this means your site should be built to provide the visitor and search engines with useful, legitimate information which is presented clearly and is easy for the search engines to index.

There is a saying in internet marketing that “content is king” and this is the cornerstone of white hat SEO. There is nothing more valuable you can do to optimise your site for search engines than offer unique well written content. Therefore by doing so, you improve your own chances of ranking well as a search engines aim is to provide the most appropriate website for any given search to the end user.

The major benefit of white hat SEO is that it’s free, the majority of the work such as making the site easily crawlable, pages well structured with well distributed keywords and well placed internal links can all be considered and implemented in the design stage. Leaving such (still free) methods as link building and article writing for after.

As a basic rule with white hat SEO if you follow Google’s guideline of how to construct a website you can’t go far wrong. The only drawback with playing by the rules is that to reach the elusive top spots of the rankings can mean investing a lot of time and effort.

Which is where Black hat SEO comes in as some webmasters aren’t prepared to wait months even years in some cases to rank well. Therefore they attempt to ‘trick’ the search engines into ranking sites and pages based on illegitimate means. Whether this is through the use of doorway pages, hidden text, interlinking, keyword spamming or other means they are meant to only trick a search engine into placing a website high in the rankings. Because of this, sites using black-hat SEO tactics tend to drop from these positions as fast as they climb once it is noted the search engine underhand methods are at play.

Below are brief descriptions of the major black hat techniques used as it can be useful to be able spot these techniques. Creare in no way uses these techniques and does not advocate using these techniques because it can only end in tears for listing of your website.

Keyword Stuffing - This is probably one of the most common techniques of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of the targeted keyword phrase in the page in the hope that the search engine will read this as relevant.

Hidden text - Text that is set at the same colour as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same colour as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same colour as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually reported quickly by competitors and the site sandboxed by the engines.

Cloaking - Is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are multiple methods of doing this but they are being discovered all the time. Even if you were to discover a method that currently works you still run the risk of a competitor discovering it and reporting you leading to an inevitable blacklisting.

Doorway pages - pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase and provide little in the way of useful content to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, they will then go to the homepage and continue on from there.

Redirects - Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site.

Duplicate Sites - When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines developed methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index.

There is a consensus that black hat SEO techniques are unethical, the ideas and content they promote certainly can be but to describe the techniques themselves as unethical depends on which school of thought you are from and how much you like to push the boundaries.

However, as mentioned several times in this article the implementation of a black hat SEO techniques may result in short term gain but overall it would be a poor choice to implement them. Like the saying goes “cheaters never prosper” and you’d be much better off playing safe, following the rules and guidelines of the search engines and employing white hat techniques if you wish to run a successful, long term, online marketing campaign.