How To Find Long Tail Keywords

I will give you a short lesson on how to use your Google Analytics. If you had someone else create your site they should have already done this so hopefully you have plenty of data to look at. But you can even start with as little as one month or one week of data.

Above you will see our data from the last week.

Here we will focus on just the top 10 keyword searches to find long tails.

We will ignore the #1 ‘soap warehouse’, #3 ‘soapwarehouse’ and #6 ‘the soap warehouse’ because they had to know about us already to use these. #2 is a good one to start with ‘best degreaser for Chinese’. Even though it did not get us great results it lets us know what people that are searching, are interested in, so we now have the opportunity to give it to them and improve our results and possible conversions into sales. Same thing with ‘how to remove extra heavy grease from kitchen equipment’ which is an extremely long ‘long tail’ yet there were 4 searchers that used that exact term just this week, although it could have been the same person using the same search to find us again. Since these two long tails fall in the same kitchen hood cleaning category it tells me I should look to use these terms in our permanent product description on our website or to create a blog post or article about this subject. Or since this long tail did find us it is possible we have already done one of these things right. The way to tell? Copy the phrase into Google and see what comes up!

So when checking the first one ‘best degreaser for Chinese’ we do not show up on the first page but are #1 on Page 2 of about 469,000 results, so 11 out of 469,000 is not bad but we want improvement. This link goes directly to our Kitchen cleaning product page which is right where we would like someone to land vs. a home page where they would then have to click into the site to find what they would want. But here is where some detective work comes in. Go back and pull up each of the first three listings to see why they ranked higher for that long tail.

The first one brings me to a company that resells cleaning products. Not even one on the first page talks about how it will clean Chinese grease, but it might be in there somewhere. So nothing I can use from this site. On to the next. Which is an article entitled ‘Home remedies to Remove Sticky Grease from Stoves and Kitchen Appliances’. This shows the power of a blog post and it didn’t even mention the word ‘Chinese’ at all. Just because it used the words grease, degreaser, and best so much Google gave it high relevance points that pushed it up in the ranking. Now to #3, this is one to focus on, first it is a site for a competing product ‘Bonzi’ hood cleaner. Pay close attention to the wording that Google found to rank it this high. We would need to improve on theirs to be able to get better results. DO NOT do what some people do and just copy ranking text so you will be right under them on the page. Remember you want to be first, not just one of others. They only mention ‘Chinese grease’ two times on this page, so we would need to increase that number or match the words ‘degreaser for Chinese’ exactly like the searcher did for Google to rank our page higher. If we go and make these changes and then give it a week we should see our page rank improve if not pass Bonzi. But we don’t just want one spot on page 1, we want more, we should also write a blog on this subject using these exact words plus ones found on our site and the Bonzi site to rank higher than the Bonzi site alone.

Let us now move to the other very long, long tail, ‘how to remove extra heavy grease from kitchen equipment’. This gives us some hope, we are now seen on page one in spot #7. The article ‘Home Remedies’; has moved up to #1 and Bonzi is nowhere to be seen even to page 5 but there are lots of other competitors around. Again shows how blog posts work especially when it uses so many of the keywords multiple times. #2 links to a site called Thrifyfun. It is a Q&A site, one of many that can really add to your ranking. When you find these connected to your keywords you should really think about joining them and adding your voice to the conversation. Same with forums, the more you show that you are willing to help and educate the public or with other contracors the higher your creditability climbs.

#3 is the eHow website. Again this is a great one to join and where to post how-to information. This does not mean teaching a potential customer how to do your job but educating them in how to choose a contractor, how to increase their home value – with your type of service, and how to spot a problem that a professional contractor like you should be called to fix for them, etc. eHow has some good and not so good articles and videos, do a search on their site for keywords that pertain to you and see what you might be able to improve upon or to comment on to clear up any incorrect information.

#4-#6 are competitors and like before when you find these, read what they say and try to improve upon it on your own site to move up your ranking.

I hope this demo helped and that you have a better idea of how to find and move up to #1 for your keyword phrases.