Many people who have read something about the term Long Tail know that, in some way, it is relevant for the positioning of their blog in search engines, but they do not understand why and, above all, they do not understand how it affects them.
So with today’s post I’m going to answer “in package” to everything that people like, for example, Mario, have been asking me about what is this “long tail” and, above all, how to take advantage of it for your blog or any other type of website, which is really what interests us about it and that, as you will see, if you know how to take advantage of it, it can be a huge boost to your blog visits coming from search engines.
What is the Long Tail?
But before we get into it, I want to tell you where this important concept on the Internet comes from.
The idea of the long tail has its origin in Chris Anderson’s article, “The Long Tail” published in 2004 and later published the bestseller “The Long Tail Economy”.
The phenomenon he describes is the trend whereby, thanks to technology, the mass market becomes a niche market (another essential online marketing term you will have read over and over again) because technology allows for the first time in consumer society, selling small quantities at low prices to be profitable.
This is seen very well, for example, in companies like Amazon with the sale of low-cost eBooks by unknown authors that would never have become viable by the conventional publishing shift or smartphone software marketplaces like Google Play or the Apple Store.
The consequences of the change are enormous and have very positive effects for the consumer, such as a much richer (more varied) offer and challenges for brands because, according to Anderson, in the Long Tail economy of the 21st century, whoever is able to monopolize minority sales will dominate the market.
In other words, there is a huge new market that is the sum of an infinite number of niches that have become commercially viable thanks to new technologies. This is the “long tail”: the head of the market would be the mass consumer products (those of “all life”) and the “tail” the specialized niches of low volume (those that are now viable) but whose sum represents an economic figure of enormous magnitude.
The Long Tail applied to SEO
Well, very nice, but what does this have to do with the positioning of my blog?
Well, it has a lot to do because the Long Tail is nothing more than a very faithful representation of people’s tastes and interests. And thanks to search engines, we know what these tastes are because they are perfectly reflected in the searches that people do on the Internet.
In other words, Google’s search engine is not only a great tool for locating information, it is also a gigantic real-time market research tool that you can leverage for your own interests. Moreover, although Chris Anderson’s perspective is more focused on sales, if we equate “selling” with “reading”, in the world of blogging the rules of the Long Tail apply exactly the same whether you are selling or simply attracting readers. Now look again at the header image of this post and you will see how it is the idea of long tail applied to search.
You are probably not aware that you are, in fact, already seeing this information every day when you search on Google. Try, for example, going into Google and typing in the word “shoes”, you’ll see that as you type it in a list of search suggestions like the one in the screenshot below. If you continue to complete the word with the suggestions, for example with “party shoes”, you will see that it suggests new search phrases based on the previous one and therefore longer, more concrete.
This is Google’s Autocomplete feature that suggests popular searches as you type and thus at the same time is “singing” to you what people usually search for on Google, information that is worth its weight in gold for a blogger for the reasons we will see a little later in this post.
Markets, niches and conversions
In the previous example of Google search we have been doing in a very simple way something basic that any blogger should know how to do: explore a niche.
According to Wikipedia, a niche market is “a marketing term used to refer to a portion of a market segment in which individuals possess homogeneous characteristics and needs, and the latter are not entirely covered by the general market offering.”
Applied to searches we could go exploring for example the searches that are performed relating to footwear as follows:
“shoes”: a very generic search and a very large segment (165,000 searches per month), so large and generic that it makes more sense to qualify this as a market. Interestingly, the generic word that represents an even larger market, “shoes”, has far fewer searches (12,100), which shows that the volume of searches is not directly related to how generic the term is.
“party shoes”: we are moving along the Long Tail to the right and now we reach a point that does fit with the previous definition, it is already more concrete and it seems to make more sense to talk about a niche, a specialized segment of the market, although in this case it is a very large niche (27,100 searches) and therefore, in principle, very attractive. In any market there are many niches to explore, in that case another similar one would also be “bridal shoes” (22,200 searches).
“party shoes Madrid”: this is already a very defined niche, so much so that it would not be unreasonable to even speak of “micro niche” (the boundaries in this are somewhat blurred …). With 320 searches it is a rather small niche.
If we were to explore all searches starting from “shoes”, as suggested by Google in the example above, a tree would be formed with more and more numerous and specialized search variants.
You can test this much better than with Google with the Übersuggest tool (thanks to Edmundo for suggesting me to mention it) which is a kind of extended AutoComplete function and allows you to greatly expand the combination of phrases and with the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, both tools are free.
On the other hand, the keyword planner will provide you with more open keyword combinations (it is not limited to the strictly hierarchical scheme of Übersuggest) and, above all, it will give you traffic volume information for each search.
In this case we have used some very generic keywords that correspond to large markets, these types of keywords are also known as “seed keywords” since they are the starting point from which an infinite number of market niches are born, which are the ones we are interested in discovering.
To do this it is essential to use a tool such as the keyword planner that I mentioned before and that is the one we are using in the screenshots of the examples.
However, there are also more optimized paid tools that make it easier to discover the keywords that really interest you, saving you a lot of time. In addition, they add fundamental functionalities such as tracking your positions in Google search results. Among all of them, I highly recommend Semrush which is the one I use.
In the following screenshot you can see how from the seed keywords the tool suggests other related searches that, depending on the case, correspond to entire markets or niches and that we can continue exploring until we reach the niches we are interested in.
Take advantage of Google’s information for the SEO of your blog (or any other type of web).
What we have just seen you can apply it at any level you want to your blog, either to focus the general theme of the blog, to focus the basic categories of content that you want to address or to optimize the SEO On-Page of your blog.
Important:
What I say here applies to any type of website, no matter if it is a blog or not. For Google’s purposes, a blog post, a blog page or any web page is exactly the same thing: a URL with a content. So when I say “blog” you can also mean “web”.
Generally applied to your blog, this means that you can estimate a priori if there really is an audience for the topic you are considering for your blog. Doing this before creating a new blog will save you a lot of disappointment.
On the other hand, applied to specific content (posts and pages) this means that when you write a content try to reconcile it as well as possible with the niches related to that content, that is, find related searches that fit with that content and optimize the content for those searches.
Applied to content, doing so with an ongoing blog that is not doing as well as expected can also be an excellent way to revitalize it by looking for a re-orientation or simply reviewing the content thoroughly and optimizing its SEO On Page, which in many cases will be more than enough to give the blog a big boost.
This means that if you are going to write a post about where to find party shoes in Madrid, make sure that the search phrase you are most interested in (for which you want to position the post) is found as faithfully as possible in:
In the title of the page. It corresponds to the HTML tag of the web page, is the title you see in the tab of the web browser. Blogs usually take it from the title of the post. In WordPress, with plugins such as, for example, Yoast SEO, you can specify it expressly differentiating it from the main title of the post if you want.<br /> In the main title of the post (<h1> tag, in blogs it usually coincides with the post title).<br /> In one or more subtitles (tags <h2>, <h3>, etc.).<br /> In the URL of the post.<br /> In the meta-description (for this you will need in WordPress also a plugin like Yoast SEO).<br /> And that it is used several times throughout the content.</p>
On the other hand, analyzing searches will reveal very interesting information. In this case, for example, you will discover that almost nobody searches for “find shoes”, but that the expression people actually use is “buy shoes”.
Therefore, a title like “Where to find party shoes in Madrid at a good price” has less positioning potential than a title like “Where to buy party shoes in Madrid”.
So by hitting on the right keywords, with the latter title and a URL like miblog.com/comprar-zapatos-de-fiesta-en-madrid” you would be optimizing your post for at least two real searches that you know people do:
“buy shoes” (40 searches per month).
“zapatos de fiesta en madrid” (320 searches per month)
And finally, two final notes:
Keep in mind that the more specific the search is within the niche, in principle the more the volume of searches will decrease, but at the same time the conversions will also increase because you are matching better and better with what the user has in mind. So don’t take search volume as the only criterion, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean less traffic.
Don’t get hung up on this. Sometimes you find suitable and attractive enough niches for a content and sometimes you don’t, in that case it’s okay, don’t waste your time trying artificial things. The priority is still to give value to your readers and a good content that is shared will continue to receive a good amount of traffic and it is possible that your content ends up positioning for searches that you did not expect.
The bad news: you are not alone, you have to compete with other websites.
To close the circle we need to talk about a vital issue: the fact that you are not the only one who wants to position yourself in a niche and that, therefore, you will have to compete for positions in the search results with other websites.
This is where the concept of “authority”, “strength”, “reputation” or “relevance” of a website comes into play. A distinction is usually made between the strength of the domain of the website and the strength of a specific page, which will vary depending on the page in question. As you can imagine, the more authority a page has, the better, the more competitive it will be. This authority is built according to the number and quality of links pointing to it.
Before we talked about SEO On Page, now it’s time to talk about the other fundamental facet of SEO which is SEO Off Page (SEO “off page”) and which is basically focused on achieving maximum authority for the domain and pages for which, therefore, will try to get as many links as possible and that these are of the best possible quality (which in turn have a lot of strength). In the blog you have several references that explain techniques to get links (Linkbuilding) and thus increase the strength of your domain and pages (or posts in the case of a blog).
The most important indicator of the authority of a page is the PageRank, although it seems that Google is leaving it aside as public data (not as an internal indicator), which is a problem for our purposes.
In any case it doesn’t matter much because fortunately there is an excellent alternative that practically all SEO experts use: the Mozrank, the indicator created by Moz, one of the most important companies worldwide in the SEO sector.
It is an indicator quite similar in its purpose, but with a finer scale than PageRank and, in addition, Moz distributes for free the Mozbar that you can install as a Chrome or Firefox add-on that integrates in a very comfortable way in the Google search results. With this add-on, Google will show the number of links of each of the pages of the search results, its strength and that of its domain, as you can see in the image on the right.
The screenshot corresponds to the search results for the search “party shoes in Madrid” (without the quotes) and thanks to the Mozbar we can quickly see that this is a relatively uncompetitive niche as the second position page does not have much strength and the following positions, although they have more strength, no longer correspond to the exact search (it does not contain the term “madrid”).
When competing for a search, it is above all important that your page authority (PA) is higher than that of the other pages.
As a general rule a PA of up to 15-20 is relatively easy to overcome, where it starts to be really difficult to compete is from a PA of 30-35, even for consolidated websites, since reaching these levels of authority requires a significant amount of links. On the other hand, the domain authority (DA) will also have an influence, but it is a secondary factor compared to the authority of the page.
Logically, the effort is not the same for a new blog as for a consolidated one. To reach these values from the beginning it will be necessary to do SEO Off Page work to get the links you need for it.
Once you have reached a point of authority and diffusion of your blog after a few years of constant work on your blog, things will be much easier because the links will come to you by themselves thanks to your community and the diffusion of your content. If you have a good community and social media outreach, you may reach a PA of 20-25 without doing practically nothing except the basic work of social media outreach. As an example, practically any page from the last year of this blog easily exceeds a PA of 25 within a few weeks of its publication.
