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.

There was a lot of buzz a few weeks back when Rand Fishkin “outed” an SEO company, citing what he called their “spurious” tactics in building links with a heavy emphasis on anchor text – tactics that had clearly worked well for them. He called this an embarrassment for Google and other search engines. A lot of the discussion that followed was focused on whether Rand had violated some ethical code or blogged out of bitterness. I think anybody that got caught up in that missed something important.

Whatever Rand’s intentions were in focusing his post on NationalPositions.com, the example he used illustrates a pretty massive weakness in Google’s algorithm – and, having read Rand’s blog posts quite regularly for several years now, I can attest that he doesn’t throw the word “embarrassment” around lightly.

I haven’t been active in the SEO field terribly long (although few have), just over three years now.  The first days of research are still fresh in my mind.

I started the way probably most newcomers are starting now – reading blogs written by people who seemed to know more than I did.

Among the things I read about links was that the following link building tactics had perhaps once held the power to influence rankings but had since been devalued by Google’s algorithm:

• Free-for-all directory links
• Reciprocal links
• Three-way link schemes
• Site-wide footer links
• Paid links that are “above the radar” and detectable
• Heavy-handed anchor text optimization for a given keyword

The tough thing about reading blogs and other sources of SEO theory is that much of what you learn is based on hearsay and anecdotal references.  Someone told someone else that they ran a test and it confirmed that this factor or another either holds weight or doesn’t.  If it’s espoused and reported by the right players, it becomes common-knowledge.

Rand himself sought to achieve consensus on some of these issues by surveying 37 of the industry’s top players on a number of factors and compiling the results in a well-polished report – Search Ranking Factors.

My problem with this approach?  Consensus doesn’t constitute fact.  It’s a nice report, but I found myself with many more questions than answers having read through the responses in detail.

Much of the consensus on link building theory has been that the above bullet points are true – that Google has learned how to algorithmically devalue the “easy” links, that they’re getting better at this all the time and there fewer paths every day to easy rankings through links.

So how is it that a company like National Positions was able to rank so well for such a competitive keyword as “SEO company” using tactics that, as the general consensus would have it, lack all value?

Because these tactics still work.  Google has not effectively rendered them useless.  National Positions, in fact, has built a business (and we can assume at least a moderately profitable one) on these very tactics.

Linkscape isn’t perfect, but it’s taken us almost instantaneously from theory to fact on the central role links play in ranking web pages. It’s also clarified Google’s ability, or the lack thereof, to algorithmically negate links that add no value for users and exist for no reason but to pass PageRank.

This will likely change in the future – it’s in Google’s best interest to correct the flaws in their algorithm, especially when tools like Linkscape expose them so clearly.  We’ll likely see a turn to less “gameable” factors in 2009, but links, undoubtedly, will still be central.

And now we’re seeing a little more clearly through the smoke and mirrors.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is constantly changing.  Search engines continuously introduce tweaks to their ranking algorithms, find new ways to rank or index website content and develop new data sources.  Monitoring your visibility and traffic on a regular basis and adapting to changes where possible is key.

You’re also going to be wrong a lot of the time.  That’s just how it works.  For all of the powerful SEO tools out there that can help you get a sense of the competition and traffic in your vertical and what it will take to build search traffic, there will always be surprises.  Accept this before you get started: you won’t always come away with success.  What you will come away with, though, is more data to work from.

Every site has a unique:

• Vertical
• Market of users
• History
• Authority
• Technical platform
• Internal link structure
• External link profile

So there’s no “one size fits all” in SEO.  Every solution will look different, have unique components and require it’s own level of time and attention.  That said, the SEO workflow cycle is, in general, the same or quite similar across all situations.

In light of the unpredictable nature of SEO, it makes sense to take measured steps over time and regularly evaluate the impact of actions taken.  In the interest of a simple approach to organization, I use a 4-phase cyclical workflow that informs nearly every campaign I manage.

The Four-Phase SEO Workflow

1. Research – collect and analyze relevant and available data such as
   • Keyword referrals
   • User behavior
   • Keyword data from external sources (average monthly usage, seasonality, emerging trends, competitive data)
   • Competitor data
   • Market data
2. Strategize – prioritize and select opportunities for improvement, set modest hypotheses about the results of tactics, link hypotheses and tactics to specific and reasonable metrics and goals and allocate the resources you’ll need (time, in most cases) to implement these tactics
3. Implement – Get it done!
4. Observe – Monitor the effects of your work, making adjustments or correcting mistakes where necessary (but keep corrections minimal or you’ll convolute the data)

In my experience, the life of this cycle should usually be around 3 months.  Any less (i.e. 1 month) and you’re not allowing enough time for the engines to reevaluate your code/content and adjust rankings (and thereby traffic) accordingly.  Too much more and you could be missing opportunities to react to changes and trends, and you may simply be wasting time.

I should add a slight disclaimer here: if you’re managing a site with a significant amount of traffic, you’re going to need to shorten the cycle quite a bit.  For websites in the upper traffic ranges, changes to site code/structure/content can be reflected in the search results in less than a day.

The idea here is to refine your tactics over time based on the actual results your efforts achieve.  For example, if you create/optimize content to target a given keyword and then observe that the improvement in ranking was minimal at best, your strategy will have to change.  It may mean a reevaluation of the link profile of the website and using new tactics for building authority in that regard (i.e. link building).  It may mean reassessment of your goals altogether – you may have been too optimistic.  This flexibility to make changes to your expectations, strategy and tactics as results come in is crucial to achieving success.

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