SEO Tactics & Metrics for the Long TailBy Stephan Spencer,

Founder & President, Netconcepts

SEO Tactics for Your “Head” Terms Focus a page on no more than 3 keyword themes –

place targeted term in the title tag, H1 tag, & high up inthe body copy Build link gain (PageRank) to that page through internal

links & inlinks Consistent keyword-rich anchor text from internal links For deep inlinks, vary the anchor text a bit

SEO Tactics for “The Long Tail” Focus on unbranded search markets Leverage your website scale & authority, brand strength Employ testable strategies that scale

– Site-wide optimizations to HTML templates, internal linkingstructure, URLs, etc.

Treat consumers as co-creators Measure against Long Tail KPIs

Long Tail Anatomy

The Long Tail of SearchThe Brand

“head”

TheUnbranded

“tail”

Why Care About the Tail? The Retail Brand Dilemma:

– Brand keywords drive most traffic• Merchant name, derivatives, URLs, or products

– Few unique pages yield results• Predominantly yielding brand search traffic• Most retail sites have tens of thousands of unique pages

Our GravityStream proxy data reveals:– Non-brand keywords drive most traffic

• Non-merchant terms– Many unique pages yield results

• Predominantly unbranded keywords

Why Care About the Tail? How many search terms should drive traffic? How much traffic should any keyword drive? How many searches are performed for such terms? How does this compare to brand searches? How could we estimate such market potential? What kinds of SEO strategies can help capture the long

tail opportunity?

How Long Should It Be?

Ways to Size the Tail Keyword Research

– Tools like Keyword Discovery, Google Insights for Search– Random combinations = unpredictable research

PPC Extrapolation– Multiply PPC results by 5-6 to estimate potential– Buying cycle and mapping ratios = incomparable estimates

Page Yield Theory– Estimates long tail potential as a function of website size– A more relevant and objective metric

Applying Page Yield Theory Requires special data, across significant sampling of

websites:– Total unique pages– Percentage of pages that did / not yield keyword traffic– Average number of keywords yielded per page– Average number of visits received for each yielded keyword– Effective click through rate per keyword to estimate total

searches

Key Research* Findings Average merchant profile:

– 73,000 unique pages (210,000 indexed in Google)– 14% yield search traffic– Each page produced 2.4 keywords which yielded 1.9 visits/month– 189,000 brand searches per month– Total potential for unbranded keyword traffic exceeds 7,000,000

Nearly 40 unbranded searches for every brand search For large dynamic sites, nearly 100 searches for every unique

page

* From Netconcepts study “The Long Tail of Natural Search”

Key Findings - Words Per Search Evaluating 1.2 Million Unbranded Searches

– 3 word search termsaccounted for 36% ofsearches

– 2 to 4 word searchesaccounted for 81% ofsearches.

– 95% of these terms were referrals generated from Google, MSN Search,or Yahoo Search.

Key Findings – Size of the Tail

Estimating Your Tail Multiply brand searches by a factor of 40

– eg 100,000 brand x 40 = 4,000,000 unbranded searches Multiply pages of site by 100 searches per page / mo

– eg 100,000 pages x 100 = 10,000,000 unbranded searches

Attack Your Freeloaders Most merchants have 80%+ of their pages driving no search traffic Most don't even know this, or why it is a problem (no javascript

based analytics package will tell them this either) It’s a red light that they lack a long tail of unbranded keyword traffic The # of searches for unbranded keywords is nearly 40x as great

as searches for the brand name (put another way, 97x the # ofpages onsite)

Tapping that opportunity means leveraging the size of the websiteand the brand strength to convert unbranded searches into clicks

How to achieve this tail?

Capturing Long Tail Potential Measure Long Tail KPIs Scalable SEO Tactics Commit to Iterative Testing

Long Tail KPIs Brand Searches: 189,000 Yielding Pages: 14% Keywords per Page: 2.4 Visits per Keyword: 1.9 Click Through Rate: 4.7% Index to Crawl: 3.1

Page Yield Matrix Estimate your page

yield based on themix of brand andnon-brand keywordspresently experience

Page Yield Pages yielding search traffic

– How many searchers clicked ad– Measures ad effectiveness– Think: Email click through

Yield Example with Google:– 6,600 pages (25%)– Non performing: 19,400 (75%)

Non-performing pages– Need to identify and optimize

Identifyingnon-performingpages

Phrases per Page Search phrase per page

– Reflects on-page keywords and internal anchor text– Surgical optimization

• Title, meta, content

Total Phrase Yield: 43,300- 4.5 phrases per ad

Leveraginguser-generatedcontent

Visitors per Phrase Search visitors per phrase

– Reflects brand strength and ranking– Influenced by internal PageRank

flow, link buying / building Search Visits: 114,200 Total Phrase Yield: 43,300

– 2.6 per phrase Search visitors per page

– 4.5 x 2.6 = 11.7– Indicates ad reach and rank

Visitors per Phrase• Static URL Structure:

– Old Style:– http://catalog.hsn.com/shop-134/fa/1585/hp!sf.htm

– New Style:– http://catalog.hsn.com/fashion.htm

– URLs Treated: >600– PageRank: PR0 --> PR4– Traffic Increase: 550%– Top-Page Distribution: 49%

Management Framework Page Yield (sub X-axis) Keywords per Page (X axis) Visits per Keyword (Y axis) These combine to create

the long tail

Sample KPIsSample KPI Report

Iterative Testing and Measurement Only utilize the strategies/tactics that follow if you can

test and measure the effects You can't just quantify effects on sales alone Incorporate new KPIs in order to view the whole

channel more holistically (vs. just looking at yourrankings on 100 trophy keywords)

Scalable Long Tail SEO Tactics Page Yield Theory:

– Goal: Maximizing unbranded natural search traffic is a matter ofpredictably increasing the yields of thousands of pages

Mass optimization:– Single techniques capable of creating cascading effects throughout large

websites – template pages for instance Rewriting URLs:

– Simple and static keyword URLs have a profound impact “Thin Slicing”:

– Touching key elements across thousands of pages quickly, monitoring,and expanding based on results

“Thin Slicing” Make quick decisions. Don’t overthink. Only really works if you’re an expert E.g. hand-optimize title tags across hundreds of pages quickly

(prioritized) Focus on your title tags, H1s and URLs Don't obsess, doesn’t have to be perfect. Instead, iterate. If you don’t have an admin interface, use a spreadsheet and do a

database import

Thin slicingtitle tags

URLs URL affects

searcherclickthroughrates

Short URLsget clicked on2X long URLs

(Source: MarketingSherpa,used with permission)

URLs Further, long URLs appear to act as a deterrent to clicking,

drawing attention away from its listing and instead directing it tothe listing below it, which then gets clicked 2.5x more frequently.– http://searchengineland.com/080515-084124.php

Don’t be complacent with search-friendly URLs. Test andoptimize.

Make iterative improvements to URLs, but don’t lose link juice toprevious URLs. 301 previous URLs to latest. No chains of 301s.

WordPress handles 301s automatically when renaming post slugs Mass editing URLs (post slugs) in WordPress – via the “SEO

Title Tag” plugin! (www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin)

Thin slicingURLs

Optimize Internal Linking Structure Anchor text is critical Hierarchical

– Through good site-wide navigational design in a header, sidebar or footer Breadcrumb navigation

– Good for users and good for search engines– Reinforces which pages are the most important

No flash-only navigation. Alt text on graphical links. Mouseover nav - CSS, not Javascript Most important deep pages should be minimal # of clicks from

home page

Optimize Pagination Excessive pagination can cause numerous pages of product

listings to not get crawled. Reduce # of pages in paginationsystem to improve crawlability & indexation

Next/Previous vs. page number list vs. Show All Consider disallowing “View All” links and forcing spiders through

subcat pages. Display as many products per page as possible(max 120) within 150K file size.

Fewer products per subcat = fewer pagination pages to crawl atsubcat level for max product indexation

Attribute Navigation Attribute navigation, a.k.a. faceted navigation, provides clickable

product inventory breakdowns, by brand, color, price range, etc.By doing so it creates into a huge number of permutations for thespiders to follow.

The problem is exacerbated by having column headingsclickable for resorting

Nofollow all links that do price range breakdown, re-sorting andre-pagination

Scalable Long Tail Tactics - Web 2.0 User generated content (e.g., product reviews, forums, wikis)

– Freely append searcher vocabulary into your website Tagging and social bookmarking (e.g., Flickr, del.icio.us)

– Listen and create feedback loops – using search terms– Use cloud taxonomy to flatten your structure using good link text

RSS and Blogging– Long tail is driven by efficient distribution of pages

Create link bait rather than soliciting link targets Provide lists of most searched keywords Long tail optimization means outsourcing … to your users

Tagging Great for deep internal linking, interlinking Generates keyword-rich links Display tag clouds of most popular tags Link to "related tags” Allow visitors to tag your stuff? (ie. “folksonomies”)

– Customers use their own terminology / vocabulary Mine your own weblogs to look for most frequently searched

keywords and use those as tags Also tag externally: reddit, delicious, digg, Technorati

In Summary Huge untapped potential lies in…

– your unbranded search markets– your website size– the Long Tail– your consumers as content creators– links

Employ testable tactics that scale Measure against a new set of KPIs