April 11, 2010

Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

SEO Analytics

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

We all know that there’s gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. Avinash Kaushik affirmed recently at SMX Toronto, that the long tail provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail.

The problem is that the long tail is hard to track and analyze. For example, on a sample website, 35 keywords yield 5,000k uniques. The balance of 26,000 keywords yield an additional 35,000 uniques. Thirty-five thousand uniques is worth focusing on, but 26,000 keywords isn't manageable.

Here are a few solutions to help you cut this beast down to a manageable, profitable size.

Reduce long tail overkill by working with a combination of YOUR BRAND + KEYWORD. For the example site, on the same sample website, segmenting out key phrase sets that included the brand name plus a keyword yielded 340 super actionable, interest-and-probably-purchase-intent-driven, highly valuable keywords. Now, that’s manageable.
Tag Clouds:Use tag clouds to see how your site is performing against your prime keywords.
Try this: Check out this tag cloud based on search data for Blackberry from Compete. it's abysmal. Your site should do a lot better.

Tag Cloud 1: Shows all their data

Tag Cloud 2: Removes the word "blackberry" and shows the rest of the traffic (which is a tiny fraction of it all)
Keyword Trees: Try Juice Analytics' Concentrate Long-Tail Search Analytics. Plug in your brand and see the intricate relationships between your name and your prized keywords. You may find content development opportunities and gain a much better understanding of what your customers really want from you. Which brings us to…

Segmentation Analysis

The problem is that we quite frankly, have lots of stuff on our websites that no one wants and we don't spend enough time making what they do want accessible, interesting, and user friendly. The solution is to segment your customers, understand what they want and when they want it, and give it to them.

Take a look at the AMOUNT of info you have on your site and relate it to how many visitors actually PICK UP that info.

In that same session I mentioned above, Avinash provided a case study of a hospital website that contained huge volumes of content on healthcare. Come to think of it, do you know a hospital or clinic website that doesn’t? Isn’t that what web developers suggest hospitals and clinics do in order to attract ‘targeted traffic’?

By segmenting the type of pages of the site into areas such as forms, healthcare information, contact and about us pages, find-a-doctor pages, etc. they were able to determine how much traffic each type of content was receiving. The most visited pages were find-a-doctor pages and forms. By a huge margin, most of the content – and most of the expense, time, and effort – was focused on the healthcare content pages, which received almost no traffic (read: customer interest) at all.

Segment your website’s pages and track traffic by page type to provide a road map to improving the value of your website to your customers. Another good reason to dig more deeply into your analytics it to determine the first touch tracking. Most people don’t buy most products or services on the first visit . Here’s a cautionary tale that will help you do something about it to improve your conversion rates.
Expedia was pushing the BUY NOW message on almost all its pages when the story began. They segmented visits by keyword meaning and intent and changed the messaging on landing pages to adjust to the stage of sale and the desires of visitors. Then they provided services that supported the needs of visitors, including a "Save session" option and an offer to "email me if the price changes".

Using the "email me" option, Expedia increased their sales by $18,000,000 in three months. $18million! "Email me if..." gives you PERMISSION TO EMAIL your customers! It’s a marketer's dream. If you come away from this blog post with no other takeaway, take this with you:

Ask yourself this: How can I finish this sentence? "email me if..."
Then use it on your site to increase conversion rates even a few percent.

Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

Table of Contents

Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics

Segmentation Analysis

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