Spring has Sprung

Spring is in the air at the Odd Dog office, where we might pop outside for a sunny noon-time stroll around Gas Works Park.

‘Tis the season of growth and changes, and nowhere is that more evident than in our youngest and furriest team member, Pantz Broetje.

It seems like yesterday Pantz was a tiny fluff of a pup. Just under 5 months old now, Pantz has grown rapidly. As energetic as he is adorable, you know the precious pooch is near when your desk starts to shake with a thump-thump-thump from his happily wagging tail.

Which reminds me of our Search Dog SEO Tip of the day:

Writing for Long-Tail Searchers

A common misconception of SEO is that the end-all goal is to get a site to rank at the top of the search results for the most popular search terms.

Let’s say I run a small Seattle cafe called Cup O’Coffee. Gut instinct and a few espressos might compel me to rashly decide that, whenever someone in Seattle Googles ‘coffee’ or ‘cafe’ then, by golly, I want to be the first result to appear!

Given the highly competitive nature of these keywords I would almost certainly be wasting my time trying to secure a top spot in the search results. But even more significantly, the majority of visits to a website rarely come from the 10 most popular search terms! In fact, most people end up on a site by using more obscure terminology. These specific searches are known as long-tail search terms.

Matt Bailey at Search Engine Guide describes the power of long-tail searches like this:

In most cases, the top 10 terms provide a lot of traffic, but not nearly as much as the total terms after the top 10 or 20 most popular. Add up the terms that refer 1-3 visits during the month, and chances are, they will add up to more total visitors than the top terms. On closer examination, most sites will have the majority of their business (sales and leads) generated from these terms that are rarely tracked. This is the heart of the long tail – that the length, or total number of low-number referred terms outnumbers the height, or the total of top 10 terms.

In other words, the terms that are most popular, most managed by site owners, are rarely those that provide the most business. In most studies, the success of the site was from the hundreds or thousands of referrals outside of the most popular terms.

Let’s examine a write up for Cup O’Coffee that could be better optimized with the power of long-tail SEO.

Original description

Cup O’Coffee is a Seattle cafe that caters to all your coffee and espresso needs. Since we opened shop in 2005, we’ve happily served our delicious grinds to locals and visitors in need of a quick caffeine fix.

Now let’s get more specific. Thinking about unique services Cup O’Coffee provides and the customers we’d like to attract, we can better optimize the description to be found online.

Long-tail Optimized description

Come on in to Seattle’s own Cup O’Coffee, conveniently located in the beautiful Ballard neighborhood. Since we opened our dog-friendly cafe in 2005, we’ve been serving organic, fair trade coffee to locals as well as visitors looking for an authentic Seattle experience.

By adding a bit more detail and keeping the searcher in mind, Cup O’Coffee stands a far greater chance of being found by virtue of the specificity of the long-tail terms!