With just short of 80,000 pages from RevaHealth.com in Google’s active index there are an awful lot of ways that visitors can find pages on our site. Looking at the keywords they searched for before arriving on the site should be an easy way to gain an insight into what our visitors want, but the sheer volume of unique keywords arising from a long tail strategy makes this much harder.

For example, in May 2009 there were 83,153 unique keywords that brought people to RevaHealth.com, and the average number of words (fragments) in each keyword was 3.88. Compare this to the 2008 global average of 2.2 words per query and you start to see how different our traffic is. The graph below helps illustrate the problem – there were 13,097 fragments that were searched for just once in May, while there was one word that was searched for 17,130 times!

Keyword fragment usage rates May 2009

So what was this most searched for fragment? Not surprisingly for a site organised by locations, it was “in”. Also unsurprisingly for RevaHealth.com, numbers 2 and 3 were “dentist” (12,837 times) and “dental” (10,041 times) respectively. The difficulty however comes with how quickly these numbers drop off. For instance, our hundredth most popular keyword fragment was “leicester”, with just 379 searches in May. In fact, you may have noticed that the above graph’s vertical axis uses a logarithmic scale just so you can see any detail!

The point of all this is that using a long tail strategy to attract traffic does make it harder to spot the underlying trends by mining your keywords. Some tips I would suggest are:

1. splitting keywords into fragments and aggregating – this at least helps to point out the most repeated individual words
2. create groups of keyword fragments under different themes or meanings and measure their collective popularity – this can help to identify broader trends i.e. which is more important to your visitors – price or quality?
3. watch out for rising trends by looking for unexpected keyword fragments appearing high on your list – these can help to identify timely sales opportunities

I’d also be interested in hearing how you go about analysing your keywords to identify important SEO terms, visitor trends and sales opportunities, so leave a comment and let us know.