SEO Long Tail of the Snake or Chasing Your Own Tail?

What is the long tail?
If you are just getting started with SEO and trying to market your small business website, you might have run across the term "long tail of the snake". It is an expression that refers to the terms that people interested in purchasing your product or service might use in a search, that are not the obvious and most popular terms (those are the head of the snake). It is a successful strategy for driving traffic and dollars to a website, but many people have problems figuring out what terms belong to the tail. This article will give some suggestions on how to find those search words.

There is nothing new about long tail SEO optimization, people have been doing it for years, at least since 2004 that I am aware of.

Finding Long Tail Terms

1. Hire an SEO consultant. That will work, but be prepared to spend several thousand dollars.
2. Look at paid keyword database and services such as wordtracker, keyworddiscovery or wordstream. Costs will be around $50 - $100 / month, and are usually cheaper if you purchase an annual contract. 
3. Use In House Expertise. If you know your product and market, odds are you know what terms clients use when talking about your product. Cost Free.

I have nothing against consultants, some of my  friends are SEO consultants. If you are a small business owner like me, you do not have the marketing budget to hire an SEO consultant.

I would suggest a combination of 2 and 3. Check out a couple of the services, they have free trials of varying lengths. Read reviews about the services (wordtracker review, keyworddiscovery review, wordstream review) and see which work for you.

Create a spread sheet of words used to describe your product or service. Include items that your product is used to build. Do you manufacture latex tubes? Are your tubes used in surgical equipment, or to make exercise equipment. If so, then add terms such as "surgical tubing" , "medical grade tubing" or "black rubber tubing".

Free Tool

Google's Keyword Tool is a great free tool to find related keywords. If you enter a list of keywords, it will show you how many times those words were searched for last month, in the US and globally. Sometimes it will display "Not enough data". Don't let that throw you. If you know your industry and that is a term used to describe your product, then your term is still a valid long tail word.

Take a look at this blog about picking and using keywords from December of 2009. It will help you prioritize which keywords to target first.

Is it worth going after long tail search terms?
Yes, but justifying it can be difficult, especially if the website does not sell product. Next week I'll talk about some simple business practices that can be implemented to help justify all this work.