Long Tail SERP's

[Agnafl]

I have been trying to hone in on some of my long tails over the last 2 months and I seem to have gone overboard. Right now my long tail is 83%. I have not changed a whole lot in the way of optimization for my main search strings, but it has changed dramatically in the SERP's. Most of my longtails are giving me #1 - #4 in the SERPS. Some of these searches are returning over 2 & 3 million results. Has anyone else noticed their longtails shooting up this drastically? Has anyone else been really targeting them? Any suggestions on finding a happy medium....

Matt

[Lydia]

Google's decision to embrace local results and their universal search algo change have played havoc with my traffic. I'm down 23% for the month- and that is with a major increase in MSN and Yahoo traffic.

The whole point of having a web presence for a RE agent is to have a local AND national presence. Local search kills that national presence- at least it has for me on some of my search terms.

Add to that dropping the organic results from 10 to 7 on the front page with their own 'natural' results and that just pushed some of my long tails right off the front page entirely.

The only saving grace I see here is that the pageviews of the visitors G does deliver has jumped nicely. The searches are more relevant. Still, G drives me nuts.

[webmaster]

If your longtails are up, that is a good thing, more hooks in the water, and if you are doing a good job in choosing them, then they are likely more targeted and have better conversion.

Have I noticed an increase? Not lately, but we are always about the longtail, and typically dominate them already, so there is nowhere to climb to.

The generic or national terms I find like "Area real estate" tend to be great ego terms for listings apt's but for thier volume, they convert at a lower rate (And a lot of them are competitors checking their rankings because of "their" egos

[Deb Shane]

What's a longtail? The more I think I know, then I come here and I don't know much :O)

[RESteve]

What's a longtail? The more I think I know, then I come here and I don't know much :O)

In a nutshell, a long tail is a keyword you incidentally hit through the creative content you write for your site. When talking about [area] real estate, you may start talking about the schools, then a subdivision, etc. Well a long tail keyword would be that school that gets searched less than 100 times a month or so, and brings visitors to your site. That's what webmaster means by, "More hooks in the water...".

You should investigate hittail.com. It's a wonderful longtail tool.

[Agnafl]

I use hittail along with google analytics and I love it. It is scary what information they track.

Here is an example of a longtail that I just saw on hittail tonight.

"businesses for sale in gatlinburg pigeon forge tennessee"

I ranked #1 for this search because I am optimized for "gatlinburg, pigeon forge, tennessee"

I had a pretty wierd one yesterday.
"need a pool for my home in sevierville" I ranked #1 for this also....don't ask!

Matt

[Deb Shane]

I think I will change my user name to "confused" I Will go that site and see what I can gleen from it. So how can one tell if they rank for a longtail?

[Agnafl]

Once you sign up on Hittail.com (free) they will give you a verification HTML code to put on every page of your site. Then it starts tracking every search that you are a result for, no matter what page or number you rank on. They have a realtime tracking tool that you can monitor which will allow you to see what search strings return your site as a result. It will decipher whether or not that search string is considered a "long tail" or a "top ten" depending on what keywords your site is optimized for. You will have to sign up and get it going to get a better idea of what I am talking about....

Matt

[BuyHawkeye]

Thanks for asking Deb. I was afraid I was off to do some more research...

I have been coming up pretty high in the SERPS for some strange strings. Now I now what to call them. I had heard of hittail but just hadn't gotten around to looking at it.

Thanks to all for the explanations.

[OCTeam]

So, Deb, I can see I need to get back to work adding some more pages and content to keep ahead of you!