The Long Tail

As search engine optimizers, we know that the long tail is the foundation of our existance. Competing against established sites with deep pockets is damn near impossible. Instead, we target our advertising and content to narrow parts of the niche with pin point accuracy. In the long tail, the advertising is cheaper, our content is better targeted, and we make more money.

All of our sites start from a simple list of topics, or base keywords. If our site was about fishing, one base keyword you would obviously want to include is “fishing”. We add modifiers to the base keywords to create more specific keywords that are used to optimize our content, and also to target pay per click advertising. In the previous example, we may use modifiers such as “ocean”, “river”, and “boat” to build more keywords like “ocean fishing”, “river fishing”, and “boat fishing”. These keywords serve as the basis of article content, headings, linking, advertising, and many other parts of our online campaigns. All of this is geared towards catching those searchers who have already progressed down the sales funnel and are ready to take action.

As a broad strategy the long tail is excellent. Target local instead of national, or target “New England House” instead of just aiming for “House”. It’s not good enough to simply aim for a niche, you must find your place within the niche. Many people try to blindside their competition by using modifiers to build keywords like “Beautiful New England House”, or “Brick New England House”. This sort of works, but it’s not very hard for other sites to follow the same strategy, and they do! Rather than build more specific keywords that are less popular, Keyword Explode is a software application that finds entirely original and unique base keywords in your niche.

Finding new base keywords, is like uncovering a whole new section of the long tail. With Keyword Explode you can find so many base keywords that you might not even know what some of them mean. The fact is however, that Google knows what these words mean, and so do many searchers. Take the keyword “New England House” for example. Did you know that a Saltbox is the name of a particular style of house in New England? Or did you know that a Sod House is a very old style of house similar to a log cabin? Now, look at what’s revealed when you have this knowledge …

That’s 258 searches every month for the keywords “primitive saltbox”, and 187 each and every month for “saltbox” alone. When you add up all the traffic for searches that include “saltbox”, the traffic volumes are substantial! There’s so many more words like this simply going to waste. By finding more base keywords with Keyword Explode, you will uncover hidden parts of your niche that you never thought existed!

Keyword Explode is a sophisticated software program that is really easy to use. The software works on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. At a once off payment of only $49, Keyword Explode is undoubtly the best valued search engine optimization research tool on the market today. Discover the hidden keywords in the long tail of your niche, before your competition does!