Use your statistics and seo to gain more longtail traffic
In this article (published in the iGB Afiiliate Magazine) we will discuss possibilities to gain more traffic using your own statistical data and some basic seo tactics.
Longtail traffic vs. shorttail traffic
We are speaking of longtail keywords when the phrase is at least two words usually more. Shorttail or generic keywords consist of one word and sometimes two words.
Why make a difference?
Obviously generic and shortail keywords produce more traffic than longtail keywords if you look at the keywords alone. Still a healthy website usually gets more than 50% of their total traffic from longtail keywords and less from generic keywords. More importantly the conversion rates are significantly higher for longtail searches than short tail.
For example:
Your website is an online casino affiliate website.
Searchterm: “Casino”
Searcher: Is looking for a real casino close to him.
Traffic: Very high.
Bouncing rate: High, because of the ambiguity of the keyword.
Conversion rate: low conversion rate, because of the non specific keyword.
Seo: Very competitive
Searchterm: “Online Casino”
Searcher: Looks for an online casino to play keno.
Traffic: High.
Bouncing rate: depends on the website, but a lot lower than with only casino.
Conversion rate: medium, because he does not find what he really is searching.
Seo: Competitive
Searchterm: “Online Casino to play keno”
Searcher: Looks for an online casino to play keno.
Traffic: low.
Bouncing rate: depends on the website shown, but if it offers the searcher possibilities to play Keno in an online casino the bouncing rate will be low.
Conversion rate: Very high, if the searcher immediately finds on the site, what he is searching for.
Seo: Less competitive
Finding the right keywords using your statistical data
Every day you are collecting data from your visitors using data collectors. The most common and of course most discussed is Google Analytics. My personal opinion is, that it is one of the best analytic tools available for free and if you have nothing to hide, do not hesitate using it. But even if you do not want to use it, there are other tools available:
- Piwik – Open source web analytics
- Webalyser – Serverside
- Awstats – Serverside
All these programs analyse your incoming traffic, right now we are interested in the search terms they used to get to your website. Choose a period which has enough hits to have decent data to work with.
Finding the right keywords
Looking at the “search terms” that the statistical data provides, we know with which keywords and phrases users have found our website. Now we have to check some things:
- Which page has been found by the user when he was searching for the keyword?
- Where do we rank for this keyword?
- Is this page optimized for seo for this keyword?
- Is this page optimized for conversion for the term searched by the user?
- Do we have a better optimized page? If yes, why does this not rank? If no, than we should create one!
To check which page has been found, just use the appropriate search on google and look. (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Online+Casino+to+play+keno) Keep in mind that we are working with data from the past and the rankings could have changed. You can also use a tool to find your domain and the page if you do not want to look at the results manually. There are a lot of ranking tools available, an interesting not so expensive one is Advanced Web Ranking (http://www.advancedwebranking.com/).
The next step is checking the page, if it is good onsite optimized, by looking at some common parameters like the title, appropriate heading (H1), content using the keyword and the internal linking structure. In addition the meta-description should be conversion optimized, never forget, that this is what the user first reads in the Google search result pages besides the title of the page.
Have a look if the page has a good call to action related to the search term and is it visible for the visitor. If they cannot click they can not convert.
If you want to find out, if there is another page, which might be better optimized for this term, use the “site” command with your domain and the keyword:
http://www.google.com/#q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com+online+casino+to+play+keno
In the case that you have a better targeted page, you should check the above mentioned basic seo parameters to find out, why this page is not ranking for his term. Finding the reasons, why this page is not ranking, and solving it usually helps to understand the page structure better, which can result in an overall better visibility in search engines.
Lets say you find out, that you rank, for example with your home for “Online Casino to play keno”, you should consider creating a new page for this keyword, because your home probably has a lousy conversion rate for this term. Usually it is better to have a specific targeted landing page for each keyword to have better conversion rates.
The next step would be to find an appropriate place for the new page in your website structure, produce good seo optimized content and publish it.
Using these technique you will be able to rank for more keywords, which results in more incoming traffic and new keywords in your statistical data. This way you can repeat the process, while your website is getting more content, more traffic and more conversions.