How To Increase Traffic and Sales With Long-Tail Keywords
By Anna Johnson on May 6th, 2009Not too long ago, search engine marketers appeared to embrace long-tail keywords as ‘low hanging fruit’ when it came to ranking highly in the search engines and generating targeted pay-per-click traffic.
Just as quickly, long-tail keywords fell out of favor because of their inconsistency in bringing in much traffic. But, it seems, smart Internet marketers and SEOs have been able to harness long-tail keywords to generate both traffic and, more importantly, sales.
In one company’s case – a sound long-tail keyword optimization strategy resulted in an impressive 200 percent increase in revenue through organic Yahoo! search alone.
According to a case study recently published in MarketingSherpa, the marketers behind candy brand, Jelly Belly, used a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that focused, first, on high volume keywords and then on lower-volume long-tail keywords.
Note: this is the exact reverse of the strategy many SEO consultants advise small businesses to adopt. Such SEOs typically advise small businesses to focus on ranking highly for long-tail keywords before targeting the most popular terms.
In Jelly Belly’s case the SEO strategy involved creating a product category page for long-tail terms that were frequently used in searches on the Jelly Belly website and that often resulted in a click.
After evaluating the terms used in searches on Jelly Belly’s website (based on frequency and clicks), the Jelly Belly team then ascertained whether or not the same terms were used a lot in, and generated much traffic from, the search engines. If so, they created a product category page optimized for those terms.
Just how many pages did Jelly Belly create and optimize? How about more than 500 pages! Yep, these guys take SEO seriously.
Having said that, the company automated and outsourced the page creation task. So, no, you don’t have to do it all yourself!
Even better for Jelly Belly, each of these pages achieved an average conversion rate of 6.43 percent, almost double the average 3.45 percent conversion rate achieved via Google Adwords.
The result was a 122 percent increase in revenue from organic Google search traffic and a 200 percent revenue increase from organic Yahoo search.
So yes, there’s money to be made in long-tail keywords!
