Dominic "The Hodge" Hodgson

When most people want SEO its because they are seeing some search traffic and want more, a lot of clients will do a one keyword search for a product or service and want to be number one for that “shoes” for example, that’s all well and good but in a world where places like Amazon are selling almost everything (and I mean everything (nsfw)) its hard for your smaller niche store to even get a chance at the top ten of a major search engine.

But we still do our best (and some of us are pretty damn good at it), when I talk to people I explain how much I love longtail, whilst being at number one for shoes is fantastic for brand and traffic, longtail terms have some amazing value.

Let’s say that the keyword “shoes” gets 10,000 searches a day, now if your number one, that will get you lets say about 50% of that traffic thats 5,000 visitors a day – FANTASTIC……but wait a minute… shoes? what types of shoes are there?

tennis, work, riding, running, sport, pumps, sandles, slippers, boots, mules, flip flops, high heels, bowling, golf, walking, winter, open toe, croc, wheel, leather, climbing, baby, dancing, tap, ice skating, snowboarding, clogs, steel toe and many many MANY more (that I and other people in the current room couldn’t remember).

So you’re a small retailer of trainers (what I assume is one of the most common shoes) and because of your rankings your getting 5,000 visitors a day, how many of those searches will be looking for trainers? You don’t know, because all they’ve typed into the engine is “Shoes”. So this leads to a high bounce rate, low conversation rate and an all together useless visitor on this occasion, it does however create a lot of brand awareness “well if they are at the top of Google for shoes they must be good”,

I prefer the longtail keywords down to the size and colour.

Going back to my shoes example and lets say Nike have brought out a new range called “HodgeTrotters”, I’d work my optimisation on things like

• Size 5 green nike hodgetrotters
• blue hodgetrotters size 11
• cheap hodgetrotters size 8

By using some PHP fun and database manipulation, theres no reason you carnnot optimise each product in your database, with shoes its not hard to get 10,000 products in an online catalogue (including unique sizes and colours), so 10,000 products, lets say for each name your in the top 10 for the longtail keyword of productname + size + colour, now these searches may only get 1-10 searches a day they will be very low volume, however because of the nature of the search, the user knows exactly what they want and how big they want it, if the usability and call to action of your website is up to scratch, you should be able to convert an extraordinary amount of these visitors.

So lets look at the numbers again (and these are complete estimates just to give you an idea)

High Volume (shoes) = 1 term x 10,000 searches = 10,000 possible visitors

Longtail (product + size + color) 10,000 terms x 5 searches = 50,000 possible visitors.

This all depends on a lot of factors of course but for me, the longtail brings a quicker benefit and more targeted users.

HodgeOut

First Published at www.thehodge.co.uk

Photo From yuankuei

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Tags: keywords, longtail, SEO, shoes
Posted In: SEO, SEO & Social Media