On March 21st Aaron Wall of SEOBook posted a blog titled, “May I Write a Post for Your Blog?“. I decided to take him up on this offer and promptly commented on the post with the topic I’d like to see him cover. A day or two later I received an e-mail from Aaron asking me for a few more details on the topic at hand and before I knew it I had a Q & A style interview with Aaron Wall. The following are Aaron’s answers to my questions.

Q: Many people have their own definition of long tail keywords. Some people believe this to be really long search quarries such as, “San Diego luxury waterfront real estate” while others might base their definition off of estimated search volume and still others have completely different opinions. What would you consider to be long tail keywords?

A: I typically consider long tail keywords to be the ones that do not show up on the keyword tools, or those that only get a few searches a month. It is entirely dependant on category as well. In some celebrity categories some of the longtail keywords may still get hundreds of searches a month. For a niche local real estate site maybe a few searches a month is longtail.

Q: I’ve read somewhere a long while ago that before you came into the picture that the term, “SEO Book” wasn’t a keyword that was searched all that much. Would you have back then considered “SEO Book” to have been a long tail search term or how would you have classified it years ago? How do you classify the term today?

A: Since it had almost no search volume at all it could certainly be considered a longtail keyword at the time. After I branded it the term became a strong keyword with significant search volume. The growth of the industry while I was marketing my brand aggressively helped as well. Other industry keywords that were not even on the map, like SEO training, have appeared as powerful keywords as well.

I think part of doing well with search is identifying growing trends and getting in early such that you can ride out the growth. If you track the conversations closely and are actively involved in the community you get to see the trends before most competitors do. That is how I picked up blackhatseo.com and whitehatseo.com for $8 each. I am sorta wasting them, but if a good idea strikes I can use them more aggressively for marketing.

Q: A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to one of my clients who questioned the value of more specific search terms which are highly competitive and harder to rank well for. To be more specific the articular terms we chewed over were, “Austin real estate” and “Austin Realtor“.

We both readily agreed that Austin real estate is the most searched keyword but what we couldn’t decide on right away is which of the two would be a better keyword to rank for. Our argument is that if someone was searching for real estate that they may not be ready for a Realtor. However if they were searching for a Realtor then they may already have a property in mind and are ready to speak to a Realtor. So my question to you is which is better to have good rankings for; a highly searched broad keyword that is harder to rank for or several dozen or hundreds of long tail search terms that are easier to rank well for right away?

A: I think ranking for a wide array of low volume keywords is a lower risk strategy. But in the above example, as you noted, both terms are related to different points in the sales cycle. The later term (realtor) should convert better, but you want exposure for the early term as well, as many people likely end up trusting and sticking with whoever they found earlier in the sales cycle.

If you are trying to compare the relative volume and values of a wide array of keywords you can use a keyword tool and a keyword list generator to create a list of keywords and bid on them via PPC. Use analytics to track which ones work best for your business.

Q: Do you currently or have you spent a considerable amount of time reviewing analytics data to find keywords that you may not have thought of in the past in order to guide your decisions on what you end up writing your own blog posts? Would you consider the majority of those gathered terms long tail?

A: Yes. I find common keyword modifiers and keyword phrases in analytics data, and then use that data to refine my keyword strategy. Many of those keywords tend to be longtail keywords but sometimes there are high volume terms that you forget to target but accidentally rank for. If you rank well for something you did not intentionally target then you should be able to rank really well when you target it. And beyond creating new pages that target the keywords, sometimes I also sprinkle the keywords in throughout page copy of established pages. This strategy can really extend your traffic for high authority pages. My keyword tool has an FAQ section to offer usage tips AND to allow that page to rank for a much wider variety of keywords.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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