SEO Strategies: Long-tails can save your website
Whenever we’re asked to do an SEO audit for a website, we start thinking about running screaming, which gives us access to SC, Analytics, analyzing their competitors, etc … But in many cases, this is not done because of what I think is much more important than a simple onpage and offpage analysis of the website.
What’s important is analyzing what type of website it is, and in this case I don’t mean “type” as a synonym of theme, but whether it’s a domain with or without authority. Depending on this factor, we need to orient the analysis in one direction or another. If, for example, you have a website for gifts (thinking about the holiday season), which is a fairly competitive sector, the first thing we need to do is review its authority, for example by the MOZ extension.
Even doing a simple search of the domain can show us that there are times when we see the Twitter, Facebook or Instagram profiles appear first, before the domain, and we can detect the level of authority and importance that Google gives to the website.
We should take into account that for the word “gifts”, Google offers approximately 117,000,000 results. Seen that way, it seems logical to avoid working with the website, at least in the beginning, by trying to position it using that keyword alone. Right? Or, at the very least, we need to be aware that if we want to open a new digital marketing business, we cannot try to compete with those top-ranked ones which have been established for a long time.
The results we would obtain would be practically zero in the short-medium term, because of the number of pages that have been working with that keyword for so many years. It’s not about hiring the best SEO in the world. Instead, you need to be objective and you need to intelligently ration the resources you have available, which are always limited, and try to get a different piece of the pie. Surely we can find other less competitive keywords, which still have an acceptable volume of searches, to start working with and getting results. And it’s not just from the beginning, but even much before that.
Do not dismiss the Long-Tail in your SEO strategy
In this respect, the key is to look to the “long-tail” and focus on more extensive keyword research. In addition to the AdWords keyword planner, Semrush, for example, is a very powerful tool when you want to evaluate very specific keywords and also look at your competition. Other interesting tools are ubersuggest and keywordtool.io.
Once we have a list of less generic keywords, we can start working on the SEO for the page, guiding it towards these. The point of avoiding, from the start, aiming the SEO towards generic and competing keywords is partly so Google can start to recognize the website. To accomplish this, we have to begin to appear in the SERPs, where Google can evaluate factors such as experience of user, CTR,% bounce, page views per visit, time of stay on the web …..
All this seems obvious, because if we’re unable to start appearing using certain keywords which are easier to position, then we will be ignored and the search engines will not be able start to “rank and score” us. In addition, if you start to have visibility, not only will the search engines begin to value you, but the user will too, mentioning you, linking to you from relevant and related sites, in short, trusting your site.
This will make search engines consider you as already being one more in this sector and, at some point, you can then start to think about working with SEO for “gifts”.
Loren Valero
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