When the Long Tail is Too Long for Keyword Research

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When the Long Tail is Too Long for Keyword Research

September 8th, 2007 | No comments

A customer of my Article Marketing Ebook, Joanne Bailey, recently asked a good question (She gave me permission to mention her name by the way) and it’s one I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, but I hadn’t gotten to it.

Her question was this:

My question is about doing searches using quotes to decide on phrases with fewer page results, thereby having a good chance of an article rating on page 1. If I search “how to market articles” using quotes I get 6,430 results. This is good. If I search the same term without quotes I get 304,000,000 results. What I don’t understand is that people mostly don’t search using quotes therefore my article has little hope of showing up on page one.

And here is my answer and explanation:

The only time you should be using Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) to determine what keyword to target is in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay Per Click (PPC). The reason you want to look at the SERPS for SEM is because you want to see how many advertisers you’ll be competing with. You’re not looking at the organic results, but rather the paid adverts. So with SEM this is vital. When doing keyword research for articles however, it’s a different story.

I realize many people will argue my answer because I believe Travis Sago teaches this method of keyword research in the “Bum Marketing Method” and this course has developed such a huge following. It is a valuable method, although it’s not new, rather re-coined, but many people are taking the keyword research section the wrong way.

I won’t quote what is said about keyword research in the Bum Marketing Method course because to be honest with you I haven’t dissected it completely. I went through most of it and realized that although it’s good info, it’s nothing new. I do know that it’s somewhere close to being similar to what so many people are doing wrong when looking for long-tail keywords for their articles.

I’ve been doing this online thing for a while and I know what works and what doesn’t works. Granted, I don’t use all of the keyword research tools that have been talked so much about lately, but good results can be achieved by simply using the Overture Keyword Selector Tool if you know what to look for.

Yeah i know, this doesn’t show you the results from Google and the results are usually way outdated (right now it’s showing search results from January) but it gives you a good idea of the popularity of that keyword phrase. If you’re using advanced trigonometry to determine whether a keyword is worth targeting or not you’ll have to add in the results from Google as well, which would probably be 5 times more, if not greater. You’ll also have to realize that this is obviously not a good tool to use if you want to target hot keywords in order to dominate that market before everyone else does…things that have recently become popular.

OK, so when you type in “how to market articles” you get 6,400 results.

keyword selection

The thing to realize when using quotes to do a search is that the results serve every page that Google has in their index, which contains that exact phrase. Does that mean those pages are competition? Absolutely not. For that particular search term, I would guess that 75% or more of those 6,400 results are not optimized for that keyword in any way. They just contain that exact search term. So now we have roughly 1,600 competing pages if my 75% figure was correct, which probably is close.

Now let’s analyze a keyword phrase that is commonly known to be competitive, incidentally one that I’ve personally achieved front page rankings with in the past “Make Money Online.”

As you can see, as of the day of writing it’s showing almost 2 million exact phrase results.

Get rid of 75% of them and you STILL have 1.5 million results!

This is huge and I’ll tell you why. Although “Make Money Online” is pretty competitive, it’s nowhere close to being untouchable. Although I’m on page 2 for it right now, I’ve reached page 1 with “average joe marketing.” What I mean by “average joe marketing” is that I didn’t do anything special. I submitted my site to directories, I submitted articles to article directories and just did all the things we know to do in order to promote a site. I’ve also seen article directory pages rank on page one for this term as well as many other competitive terms.

So why is there such an enormous gap between the two keywords above? Of course one is more competitive than the other, but part of the reason is because SERPS are just not an accurate form of keyword research.

I’m not going to get into the entire keyword selection process because this article is already turning into a book, but my point is this - If you’re targeting long-tail keywords that are too long, you’re missing out on a bunch of traffic and (ok two points) you need to use keyword research tools to find the keywords you wan to target, not SERPS.

I’m not saying that you should be targeting keyword phrases that are as competitive as “Make Money Online,” that was only an example. Long-tail keywords are good to target, but don’t go too far.

To sum it all up, just because an article ranks #1 for a keyword, doesn’t mean anyone is going to see it!

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