SEO London, Edinburgh Internet Marketing Breeze Media

Longtail key phrases in search engine optimisation can account for as much as 85% of your web traffic but many websites fail to optimise their pages to good effect. In this post we show you how to discover these keyphrases and optimise more pages for ranking in search engines.

Discovering your key phrases using Google Analytics

Log into your GA account, click on view report for your website then click on the date range dropdown in the top righthand corner to display the date range calendar. Select a date range of around 6 months and click apply.

Next click “Content” from the main menu on the left then scroll down the page a little and you should see you list of options for drilling down your keywords. See below;

Click on the entrance keywords link and wait for the page to load your list of keyphrases. Scroll down and click on the dropdown and select 500.

The page will then reload and this will display your list of keywords and keyphrases with your main target keyphrases occupying the first 10-15 places. There may be more of your main phrases depending on how many pages you have optimised for these terms but for simplicity lets assume it’s the first 10 results. Any phrase below these can be considered as longtail and it’s these phrases that we’re interested in.

As you scroll down the list you should notice combinations of your main keyphrases surrounded or blended by other words. For example say your main keyphrase for one of your pages was “search engine optimisation”. Because people have used a multitude of different searches you may see different combinations of your main phrases such as below.

buy search engine optimisation services
top search engine optimisation consultants
where is the best search engine optimisation company
best price on search engine optimisation
search engine optimisation consultants in scotland
search engine optimisation company in edinburgh

So why all the variations?

People are smarter at searching nowadays and they realise that they may need to add extra words in the search to obtain a more accurate result. Google has provided a result based upon other words that match the users search and has indexed your site in their listings.

Determine your longtail keyphrase position in Google’s SERPs

The next step in the process is to select one of your long tail phrases and see where it is listed in Google’s results. To do this simply copy the longtail phrase and search for it on Google. Chances are you may not be on the first page but don’t worry about this – just drill down until you find your page in the results.

When you find it, click on the link that says “cached” below Google’s description for your page. The next page displays the highlighted keywords in the grey bar. Google also highlights the same key words in your page’s content. See image.

This will tell you how many times the words appear as a phrase or as single words and from this you have several options for optimising your page for this specific longtail phrase such as…

1. Add the exact phrase to a paragraph in your page

2. Provide a link from one of your other pages using the exact phrase in the anchor text

3. Ask for a link to your page using the exact phrase in the anchor text

4. Create a new page and use the exact phrase in the page title, h1 tags, paragraphs etc as you would for optimising a standard page

5. If you run a blog then create a blog post optimised around this phrase

6. If you post regularly on a forum or a blog then use this exact phrase in your footer or blog post linking back to your page.

Of course there are many ways you can incorporate your longtail phrase in your pages and that’s part of the attraction. The main purpose is to rank as high as possible for these phrases and hopefully you will rank higher and sell more online.

If you would like to know more about lontgtail optimisation then please contact us.

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