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.

Do you know how many unique queries are bringing your site visitors? Last week for RevaHealth.com the number was 17,181! It shows that the long tail is working. When applied to search engine traffic, this simply means that a website receives most of its visitors through a collection of low-volume search queries rather than a handful of major keywords. <

There are a few reasons why we optimise RevaHealth.com for long tail key phrases. Firstly, it’s much easier for us to rank well on search engines for rare key phrases because of the lack of competition. For example, our site isn’t listed within the Top 10 Google SERPs for ‘dentists’, while for ‘dentists dublin’ we are in position one. Being able to rank so well for these long tail keywords guarantees us a large slice of the traffic these keywords generate.

Secondly, in order to target the long tail, we have created a lot of pages, which means we end up with a lot of pages indexed (39,900 so far), which gives us great visibility. What’s more, this increased visibility is very valuable, growing our audience and earning potential revenue. What’s more targeted visitors seeking very specific information tend to useg long tail keywords and as a results are more likely to convert or click on contextual ads, increasing our revenue per visitor.>

Discovering which long tail key phrases are relevant to your business isn’t difficult but it is time consuming. There are a number of great free tools available from Google : Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights For Search, Google Trends. Sometimes however the simplest way to get good information is to actually publish pages with unique sets of keywords and see whats gets traffic. We rely on this method of generating content as we continue to add new treatment categories and destinations on a regular basis.

A recent Google study on search engine users’ behaviour provides more evidence that back up the theory of the long tail. According to the research, as time passes, people are using longer and longer phrases in the search box.

The 2008 average is 2.2 words for query, while in 1994 it was only 1.2 words. Some sources mention even higher numbers, for example, the Nielsen Norman Group cite 3.1 words per query. And this number still grows.

These are examples our search terms that have directed traffic to RevaHealth.com:

• how much does braces cost in mexico
• anyone had liposculpture with dr robin van look?
• board-certified plastic surgeon in poland
• list of dentists in singapore dental clinics
• effective face lift in the philippines

The long tail is, then, an undeniable opportunity to attract more visitors. Targeting multi-word search queries, optimising a website and creating content to match the long tail, allows us to win potential users and buyers. The down side is you need to create a lot of pages with unique and valuable content so that the search engines index them.