SEO And The Long Tail: Can You Optimize For The Occasional Visitor? Part 2

In part one of this article we discussed what the long tail of SEO is. We also went over some of the seo challenges that you face doing seo for the long tail. Here are the next things to do.

Segmented SEO to target your sub-niche

Now that you have discovered where your visitors and coming from and where they are going on your web site you can begin to target them with search engine optimization. Now that you know the sub-niche you can better target them with the keyword terms and phrases that they not only used to visit your site but also do the research necessary to find more terms in that sub-niche.

Here is an example: (these are all fictitious web sites)

Through your Analytics you notice that visitor are coming to your site in the following ways:

• Using the keyword phrases
  • designer dog clothes,
  • hats for my dog,
  • vest for my puppy
• They are coming from the web sites
  • designerdog.com/summer-line.html,
  • cooldoghats.com/custom-hats.html,
  • puppyattire.com/vests/designer/disney/red-vest.html

You notice that most of your visitors are looking for some type of designer or custom dog clothing. When you do some additional research you will find that there are several sub-niches in the designer dog clothes niche.

• cheap designer dog clothes
• designer dog coats
• designer dog clothes UK (country specific)

Now that you have some phrases that consumers in the sub-niche use you can target those phrase specifically by adding content to your web site about that sub-niche. You can also start a PPC campaign to see how well those visitors convert into customers. You would give preference to higher converting keywords and phrases.

The biggest question now becomes is Segmented SEO worth the extra effort?

Targeting all of those low traffic phrases will eventually pay off buy when? How much will you have to spend to achieve the desired results?

With the efficiency that the search engines make information available and realizing that half of all the searches done on a daily basis are unique it will become necessary to do as much SEO for those "Long Tail" phrases as possible without taking away from your key traffic generating keywords. It will be an ongoing process but the main benefit is that as with most Long tail phrases achieving a high ranking isn't that difficult.

Best Practices for Segmented SEO (SEO for the Long Tail)

• Use a good analytic program (Google Analytics is free to track your site visitors if you use adwords)
• Look for trends and patterns in your web site visitors
• Do additional keyword research on your target sub-niches
• Use PPC to discover the most profitable keyword phrase in your sub-niche
• Do SEO for your most profitable phrases first.

By Following these best practices you should be able to dominate your sub-niche and quickly gain a competitive advantage in your niche and larger target market.

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