Reading Minds – the Secret to the Long Tail

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The keywords you want in your content aren’t the buzz words from your marketing copy, or the basic words that everyone else will be trying to optimize for. Finding out that there are ten trillion searches for the word ‘women’s shoes’ every day doesn’t help you a bit.

Neither does knowing that the most popular search term yesterday was ‘swine flu symptoms’. What you need goes deeper and is much more complicated and much simpler – all at the same time.

You have to figure out what your ultimate customer is thinking. The customer that wants what you have, and nothing else, you absolute target demographic. You have to figure out one basic thing, one tiny vital piece of information to help you choose the keywords to optimize for.

You have to get inside their head. This is what you want to see, through their eyes as they sit down at their computer and mouse over to the search box –what do they type???

If they are looking for waterproof brown leather lace up hiking boots, and know that is what they want, they might spend the time to type it in to get past the millions of generic boots, hiking boots, brown boots and lace up boots sites. If you have optimized for the long tail, hey presto. It’s like magic – you read their mind, and here is you site in all of its brown leather lace up hiking boot glory.

I‘ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – better to be a big fish in a fishbowl than a little fish in a lake. This applies to long tail optimization perfectly. If you are ranked #1 for a phrase that is search for 10 times a week, you have cornered the market. You will get more hits and conversions off of highly targeted leads than you would if you ranked 100^th for a generic term with billions of searches a year and people who never click past page one.

Optimize for the long tail. There is NO excuse not to.