The long tail of your search engine traffic doesn’t always represent the long tail of search. Sometimes the keywords that are referring just one or two visitors per month to your site actually bring a lot of traffic to search engines – you’re just not ranking well-enough to capitalize on the bulk of it.
Here is a quick and simple method to utilize your analytics, a ranking tool and any spreadsheet software to quickly and easily identify opportunities to improve traffic from the long tail of your search traffic.
What you’ll need to follow these steps:
- Access to your web analytics profile (I’m using Google Analytics for this example)
- Software to create/edit spreadsheets (MS Excel, OpenOffice or Google Docs is fine)
- SEOBook.com’s Rank Checker (or a similar rank checking tool – it just needs to export to CSV)
I’m going to include screen captures for illustration wherever possible and appropriate since I think it will help explain the tasks/points involved – I’ll be using the data for UnstuckDigital.com.
Step 1: Grab Your Keyword List
I like to work with a list of between 50 and 100 keywords for this task – more would be fine. A simple way to play with the total keyword number is to adjust the time frame of your search referral report. Since we’re going to be looking for long tail opportunities based on current rankings, the keyword list needs to be specific to a given search engine. I’m going to use Google for this example.
For Google Analytics users, you just need to navigate to Traffic Sources > Search Engines, and select your search engine – Google in this example (again, adjusting your report time frame to play with the keyword count).
Once you’ve got your keyword count where you want it, simply export the report to a .csv (comma-separated file). If you have any trouble with this step, using a .tsv (tab-separated file) should work just as well. Generally, we’re looking to export the following data for each keyword in the list:
- Number of visits
- Pages per visit
- Time on site
- Conversion rate (if available)
I don’t find bounce rate to be a terribly valuable metric for this report, essentially because we’re focused on the long tail here – which normally consists of keywords that refer only a few visitors (sometimes only 1) – so the bounce rate won’t have much granularity (it’ll usually be either 0% or 100%).
Step 2: Import Your .CSV To Spreadsheet Format & Clean It Up
Once you’ve exported the .csv or .tsv file, simply import it into your favorite spreadsheet editing software (I’m using Google Docs). A lot of the time the .csv will be messy to start with (it is with Google Analytics), and it’ll include some data you probably don’t need (including bounce rate) – so now is the time to clean up your spreadsheet.
You’ll also want to draw a line and cut out some of the “short head” keywords – I tend to cut out anything that sends more than 5 visitors per month, but you’ll want to find a good cut-off point for your site’s traffic levels. I also cut out so-called “navigational” queries, or keywords that show the searcher knew what site they wanted to land at.
Keep your layout as simple as possible – it makes things much easier to read.
Step 3: Grab Your Rankings
This step is pretty simple. Just grab the list of keywords from the spreadsheet, drop it into your rank checking software and let it run. I find SEOBook.com’s Rank Checker to be a great and easy-to-use rank checker – and it exports the results nicely to .csv format.
Once the ranking report is done, export the results to .csv format, import them to a separate spreadsheet and copy/paste the proper columns into your existing spreadsheet. Rank Checker includes the URL of the page that ranks, which is very helpful, along with an absolute position number generally from 1 to 100 (anything higher than that and you’re way off the radar anyway).
Step 4: Sort and Format
Now you’ve got a spreadsheet that includes the following for all of your long tail keywords referred from the search engine you selected (during the given time frame):
- Number of visits
- Pages per visit
- Time on site
- Conversion rate (if applicable)
- Current ranking
- Page that ranks
I like to sort by either one of the quality metrics (pages per visit, for example) or by the ranking. Color-coding the ranking column can make it easier to spot rankings on the second or third page of search results – these are rankings that can usually be improved with some tweaking or content creation, and therefore they should represent opportunities to pull in more traffic.
The medium blue colors in the image above represent what we might call the long-tail opportunities – and the fact that these keywords are referring only one or two visitors per month while the page ranked shows up only on the second or third page of search results suggests there is likely more traffic to be had if a better ranking can be achieved.
This is just one quick method I’ve developed to identify long tail SEO opportunities – the process takes no more than 15 minutes. And you don’t need to pay for a tool to do it.
This is by no means a perfect method. I’d love to hear about some other methods of working with the long tail in search – please share in the comments.
