Long Tail? Get out of the Box!

[sunshineseattle]

Presumably the "long tail" are the little searched PPC words that, in agregate (thousands of words?), can make up a significant addition to your lead generation. They cost less because few if any are bidding on them. I think "long tail" is a marketing ploy of the big three search engines. They use this to get some PPC for those "unpopular words".

It seems to me that it is just as powerful to use popular words on unpopular search engines. A prospect is a prospect wherever they come from, right?

[Eric Blackwell]

Sunshine;

First off, thanks for being here...
Second, a couple of notes first, this topic may be better handled in the PPC section of the forum (scroll down a bit and you will see it.)

And now to the subject at hand. Long tails are NOT (imho) a creation iof the SEs. They are a PRODUCT of people's natural evolution to longer and more detailed search as they become more comfortable with the concept of search..

A prospect is a prospect wherever they come from. By paying less for a KW that carries less, but still SIGNIFICANT and RELEVANT traffic, you are increasing your return on investment.

Best;

Eric

[drewnick]

My entire strategy revolves around natural long tail rankings. I'm getting qualified leads who know what they want in many cases. Long tails can be more work to start because there is significant time spent on content creation and individual SEO for each target term. Once you have that done, the rewards can be great.

It's easier to focus on optimizing for long tail on ALL search engines than it is to go to the lesser engines and outbid competition.

[OHMwebmaster]

Yep, Drew's right.

If you've got the time and energy, focus on the long tail with SEO, not PPC. PPC costs you time after time, but SEO lasts forever.

Or until a competitor does it better.

[brandonre]

Yes, With long tails it's better to be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond.

[Agnafl]

I personally have found that if you provide good quality content on your site that is detailed and specific to your area and niche/s that you service then the longtails pretty much take care of themselves. Pretty much..not completely!

What I find interesting is that I rank very well for MY longtails as well as others. For example, my site is for a Century21 agent and I rank well for certain longtails that have the word ReMax in them??? Anyway, longtails are definately the way to go for me, especially in a realtor saturated market!

[OHMwebmaster]

Interesting, Agnafl.

Could be some Google synonym stuff going on there, although that's a pretty long stretch.

Perhaps someone linked to you with ReMax in their anchor text?

[BuyHawkeye]

Same with me. I get longtail results for other broker names. What up with that? I am certainly not optimizing for their branding names.

[Homesurfer]

I personally have found that if you provide good quality content on your site that is detailed and specific to your area and niche/s that you service then the longtails pretty much take care of themselves. Pretty much..not completely!

Exactly. If you have rich content on a variety of subjects you will find yourself ranking for lots of search queries that you would never even think of on your own. The page I write about mortage rates shows up as number one for "interest rate predictions" and I never would have even thought to look for that in the search engines. There are tons of examples like that across the web.

[webmaster]

They get you a damn good start, and that is where Blogalytics takes over