Discover and Track Your Long Tail Patterns

I promised Gabriel to come up with the article and so here it is. I decided to share with SEOmoz members my technique to catch up the targeted Long Tail. I used to work in the celebrity niche promoting an entertainment ecommerce site, and that's where blogging was one of the most effective solutions to build the brand and generate both traffic and conversions. I started blogging on celebrity gossip. I did understand that it was almost impossible to rank first for <<celebrity name>> in search engines because competition was too high in that niche and the informational flow was overwhelming. The only way out was Long Tail, and that's when I had to figure out how to keep up with the most relevant key phrases. There are only few tools out there allowing to do this and none of them is perfect, so I needed to be creative.

I used quite a few stats analytics tools to track referrals from search engines (e.g., SiteMeter, Google Analytics, and HitTail). However, every single day the search queries which sent me some traffic were different, so I needed to somehow categorize them. I started a spreadsheet for each celebrity name sending me any amount of traffic with Column B containing the celebrity name and

column A: a word going before the name;

column C: a word going after the name;

column D: a word going after the word C.

Note: in each case the number of the columns can vary.

The great thing about an Excel document is that as far as you have collected data you can sort it by any column and see the pattern. Now you just have to be creative with colors and formatting. In my case, I used yellow to highlight the word groups in Column C (as the most frequent pattern turned out to be <<Celebrity Name>> + <<WORD>>). Then I could see most popular words following my main key phrase. Moving even further, I used colors for most general three-word combinations: red for WORD + CELEBRITY NAME + WORD formula and green for CELEBRITY NAME + WORD + WORD combination.

When all this was done, I could start playing. I used four-word combinations (red + green patterns) for a start, then I could narrow it to three-word combinations (just green or just red), and at last I ended up with <<CELEBRITY NAME>> + <<WORD>> phrases.

What is also exciting about the celebrity niche is that almost all patterns can be applied to any name (Note: I highlighted most general patterns in my spreadsheet, so I could easily find them). Instead of writing "<<Celebrity Name>> @ ‘Silk’ Premiere," I referred to my spreadsheet and used "(Hot/Paparazzi/New) Celebrity Name pics: ‘Silk’ Premiere" as the title. The only trick was to figure which celebrity would be searched and when - and that's where I had to turn to various celebrity news channels and popular blogs. I had to subscribe to a number of them to track daily popular names and give my visitors what they wanted to read.

My approach was quite simple, but it boosted both my traffic and conversions. I hope my tips will give you some food for thought and you will come up with an even more effective approach. I keep using this method in other niches and it always comes in handy (unless it is overused). Hopefully, it will be helpful to you too.