Building upon success - the long tail & using existing keyword traffic
In my experience, many people undertake keyword research when developing new pages or sites but neglect to continue to study keywords on existing pages and utilise current success to further increase their authority within the topic they are addressing. In short, you’re leaving traffic - and therefore money - on the table. If a search engine is providing traffic on a subject you are already ranking for, it’s easier to get traffic for subsets and expansions on that topic, than to develop a new page on a new subject.
This is essentially an expansion of the long tail idea which says that although a few pages on your site provide the vast majority of the traffic on a page by page basis, the tail of the site’s keywords will provide more traffic overall. It essentially reverses the expected pattern in that although the top terms will provide a nice big chunk of traffic, there is a lot more traffic to be found in the tail of the search terms people use to hit your site.
On my personal site which has a fairly extensive linux & webmaster tips section that I’ve added to over the years, I find via hittail that the top ten keywords are 17.4% of my search traffic, leaving 82.6% to the long tail terms. Furthermore, 103bees (that’s 10 cubed by the way) tells me that nearly 43% of my traffic was from terms used only once, though the top 5% terms generated 38% of my overall traffic.
However, when you dig into the long tail traffic much of it naturally remains closely related to the top key phrases. For instance, the phrase “MySQL Distinct” is in the top ten phrases, but I also have dozens of mysql terms in the long tail, and more variants of mysql distinct itself. Looking at the Google SERPs for those specific terms I already get traffic for I see the following results:
| Key Phrase | Position: Google.com |
|---|---|
| mysql distinct | #3 |
| distinct mysql | #6 |
| distinct in mysql | #8 |
| mysql distinct group by | #8 |
Taking those phrases into the Google Adwords’ keyword tool (Wordtracker provided just 1 result, mysql select distinct) I also found a few other phrases it would be worth exploring on mysite, cementing my position on the terms and generating more traffic via long tail searches for something I essentially I’ve already done the work for:
- mysql select distinct
- php distinct
- sql server distinct
- update distinct
- insert distinct
- inner join distinct
- delete distinct
- access distinct
- group by distinct
- where distinct
- distinct join
- sum distinct
- distinct query
- order by distinct
- count distinct
- distinct statement
- distinct queries
- distinct null
- distinct command
- left join distinct
- distinct function
- distinct row
- distinct syntax
- having distinct
I’ve already removed the less relevant terms, such as Sybase, Mssql, Postgres etc from the original list leaving a set of keyphrases now with a pretty good relationship with my existing page mysql distinct
The page itself is pretty short, containing little more than two examples of SQL and a brief explanation, so should I chose to, it would be pretty easy to add more terms to fill the page a little more and start to rank better for these other terms. Furthermore, I could also use those terms to generate new pages for the site and interlink them from existing ranking pages and to other pages I want to target.
Utilising overall long tail terms to generate traffic can work wonders on very large sites, which is essentially Amazons success, but for a normal sized website to rank anywhere high enough to get traffic the phrases will need to be related to keywords you already are ranking for.
In a case of a site wanting to rank for both apples and oranges you’d start by building on any successes on apples with other related long tail apple terms - Granny Smiths, Bramley’s and Cox’s Orange Pippins - rather than targeting apples, oranges, bananas and pears. It’s the long tail of your existing authority. Services such as 103bees make it easy, they show you the hits you have, and you can easily mine the data to find other terms you have had a tiny bit of traffic for that you can now build upon.
Look at the terms you already rank for, and then look deeper into your long tail. If you can create a small database or spreadsheet of how those terms relate you are well on the way to developing more authority within your specific topic simply by placing a few relevant sentences on existing pages, better yet, build a few new pages with the new target phrases.
Once you’ve become successful in one area, it’s becomes easier to move that success into another topic - become successful in apples and then you’ll be able to move into the oranges business too.
