Like most other content publishers, here at Kikabink News we’re eager to learn – and share – tips for attracting more web visitors. So you can bet I was eager to learn about how HealthCentral generates greater search traffic based on targeting long-tail keyword searches.

MarketingSherpa recently profiled HealthCentral, a personal health website, in one of its case studies. The company’s tactics for using content to attract more visitors are PURE GOLD for all content publishers. In one case, HealthCentral generated a 40 percent increase in natural search traffic to specific pages when it focused on developing long-tail opportunities around a promising topic.

I’ve translated and expanded on the tactics used by HealthCentral into the following 5 steps for using long-tail keyword search data to get more traffic to your site:

Step 1: Look at the search phrases that attract people to your site

Your website analytics program should tell you what keyword phrases people are typing into Google and the other search engines which lead them to your site.

If you graph this out – so you can see the volume of traffic per number of keywords in the search phrases used – you will often discover the best opportunities lying in the center of the distribution graph i.e. between the ‘head’ and extremely ‘long-tail’. These will typically be phrases containing 3-6 keywords.

Now, review the high volume phrases: these are potential topics for you to create content around.

Step 2: Assess the traffic potential of each topic

Fire up your keyword research tool because the next step is to see whether it’s worth devoting the time, effort, resources, etc to creating content for the topics you’ve identified.

Depending on whether you’re mainly concerned with traffic from Google, or also want to target traffic from the other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, etc), you could use Google’s free keyword research tool or a more general search engine keyword tool such as WordTracker or Keyword Discovery.

Of course, if your web analytics tool reveals that most of the keywords that attract people to your site are actually typed into Google, then it makes sense to use Google’s keyword research tool.

Once you’re ready to give your keyword research tool a spin, identify a set of keyword phrases for which your site is already well-optimized and type in each phrase to see how much monthly search volume it gets. Then calculate the average ratio between the monthly search volume for each phrase and the ACTUAL traffic your site gets from that phrase.

This ratio gives you an idea of the relationship between search volumes and actual traffic to your website. You might find, for example, that you get one visitor for every three searches.

Next, type your list of potential topics into the keyword research tool to generate traffic estimates for these as well as other, similar phrases (be sure to prompt the keyword tool to ‘suggest’ similar phrases). Then, once you have a bunch of keyword phrases and their associated traffic estimates, apply your ratio to predict how much traffic your site will get from each of these keyword phrases.

Based on which keyword phrases meet your traffic criteria (whatever that may be), you can now whittle your list of topics down to only those that show sufficient traffic potential.

Step 3: Target the topic, not its keywords

Now that you have a list of topics, it’s time to create some content. Rather than focus on the keywords themselves, however, consider the HealthCentral approach, which is to generate an interesting article about the topic.

Here’s how this exercise might work. Imagine you have the following high traffic keyword phrase (which I made up):

“best quality coffee machine”

Rather than write an article that repeats “best quality coffee machine” over and over throughout the article (a practice known as ‘keyword stuffing’) you might, instead, devise an article on the topic of coffee machines or on the topic of making a great cup of coffee.

In this case you might include the targeted keyword phrase in appropriate places in the article, but it will appear incidental and natural to the topic, rather than ‘forced’.

Remember, the aim of the exercise is to attract and build your audience – visitors who will enjoy your content and come back for more (without having to go through a search engine) – NOT to target the search engine spiders. Therefore, you want to produce informative, entertaining and READABLE content… not bland, boring, keyword-stuffed drivel.

For its part, HealthCentral engages writers to come up ideas for articles based on the topics it’s identified, and deliberately does NOT provide them with keyword lists.

Step 4: Assess visitor satisfaction

HealthCentral assesses visitor satisfaction by checking bounce rates and implementing surveys.

There are two generally accepted definitions of ‘bounce rate.’ One defines the bounce rate as the percentage of visitors who land on a webpage without clicking any additional pages on the website. The other defines the bounce rate as the level of visitors who immediately leave the page the moment they land on it, often measured as the percentage of people who leave the page before it has fully loaded.

While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a bounce rate associated with a landing page that doesn’t have many or any outbound links (since you don’t want visitors clicking off the page), a bounce rate associated with people leaving the page before it has fully loaded indicates dissatisfaction with that page.

When it comes to visitors from natural search, a high bounce rate based on the second definition indicates a large divergence between what people think they will find when clicking on the link in the search engine results… and what they actually find.

If that’s how your website analytics program measures your webpage bounce rate then you might as well regard your bounce rate as an indication of the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the content of your pages.

Here, again, you might want to emulate HealthCentral’s approach to evaluating bounce rates. HealthCentral uses a three-month bounce rate average as a benchmark and reviews pages that have a bounce rate that’s 10 percent or more above this benchmark.

Rather than rely on this alone, however, the company also solicits visitor feedback via online surveys. These provide more details about WHY readers may or may not like a specific webpage and what improvements may be necessary.

In summary, once you’ve developed content based on your long-tail keywords, you can now see if that content is hitting – or missing – the mark. If you have an extraordinarily high bounce rate it doesn’t necessarily mean you were wrong in targeting those keywords, though; it may just mean your choice of content has failed to resonate with your audience. It’s back to the drawing – or writing… or video – board!

Step 5: Use the long-tail keyword search data to steer your overall content strategy

It almost goes without saying that the long-tail keyword search data you obtain through these 5 steps gives you valuable insights into the interests, preferences and trends among your audience.

Not only can you use this at the ‘micro’ level of developing specific articles, videos or other content, but you can also use this at the ‘macro’ level of developing or steering your overall website content strategy. Additionally, if you sell advertising opportunities on your site, you can share these insights with prospective and existing advertisers.

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Lift Long-Tail Search Traffic: 6 Tactics to Find and Test Niche Content Areas,” MarketingSherpa, May 11, 2010

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Feature, Search Marketing, Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.