Thursday 1 March 2018

How to Increase Your Sales Through Long Tail SEO

long tail seo
SEO isn’t just about driving traffic to your website. It can actually be used to increase your sales. Just think about it: what’s one of the main reasons you use search engines?
To do research, right?
For example, if you are interested in purchasing Crazy Egg, you may do a Google search for “Crazy Egg review” to see what other people think of it. If the reviews are positive, you’ll be more likely to get a few more sales.
Because reviews of Crazy Egg are good, we were able to generate $19,380 in the last 12 months in income from the sites that rank on page one of Google for “Crazy Egg review”.
On the flip side, I knew an auto financing company that had to close down because of poor reviews. The search engine would display so many negative reviews when one searched for the company’s name with the word “review” that it drove their monthly revenue from $318,288 in January down to $141,509 in June. At that point, they had to shut down because they were spending more money than they were generating each month.
Want to increase your sales through long tail SEO? Then follow this 3 steps approach.
Now that you understand the value of long tail SEO, how can you increase your revenue through long tail search? All you have to do is to follow these 3 steps:

Step #1: Keyword research

What keywords do your potential customers search for when they are interested in buying your product? Well, the obvious ones are:
  • [Your company name] alternatives
  • [Your company name] reviews
  • [Your company name] competitors
  • [Your company name] discounts
One way you can figure out what people are searching for is to look at Google Suggest data. All you have to do is to start typing your company name into the Google search box. You should get a set of results that look similar to this:
google suggest
The only problem with Google Suggest is that it limits how many keywords it shows you. Luckily, there is a tool called Suggester, which gives you all of the other keywords Google Suggest didn’t show you.
google suggester
Once you have a full list of terms that people search for when it comes to your company name, you can then figure out which ones are relevant.
For example, when I ran the word “Crazyegg” through Suggester, it showed me that people also type in Crazyegg competitors, Crazyegg coupons, Crazy Egg Clicktale and Crazy Egg case studies.
Now that you have a full list of keywords that potential buyers search for, the next step is to create a strategy.

Step #2: Create a strategy

You have two main options to choose from… the first is to create landing pages on your site that focus around each of the long tail keywords. The second is to get other people to create landing pages on their own sites about your product that focuses on the keywords above.
So, lets start with creating landing pages on your own site. If you have a content management system, this shouldn’t be too hard to do. If you don’t, you may want to try Unbounce. They have hundreds of templates, so all you have to do is to add content.
Another solution is to use something like WordPress. We actually use this approach with Crazy Egg. We used Step #1 to figure out what queries potential customers were searching for and found that the queries were mostly product-related.
As you can see in the screenshot in Step #1, people searched phrases like Crazy Egg WordPress and Crazy Egg Code. So, we created a support section using WordPress, where we answered questions our potential customers might have, given their search pattens.
Now, if you want other people to create pages on their sites that revolve around your long tail keywords, there are a few strategies you can use:
  1. Give away a product or service to bloggers – don’t expect anything in return from them, but if you have a great product or service, there is a good chance they will write about it. If they write about it, make sure you let them know to nofollow the links so that you aren’t manipulating search engines. This strategy should help you control the results for “review”-related keywords.
  2. Run promotional offers – by adding coupons and discount codes to sites such as Retail Me Not or Coupons.com, you can start having other sites rank for terms revolving around coupons.
  3. Create a grants program – you don’t have to give college kids money to help them. You can give them your product or service for free. Microsoft does a lot of this with startups through their BizSpark initiative. TreeHouse did this with their training course, and they were able to get bloggers like TechCrunch to write about it. This strategy helps create goodwill and positive buzz about your company.
If you are unable to create landing pages, you can also run pay-per-click campaigns. We do this with Crazy Egg as it creates a positive ROI. For instance, if you Google “Crazy Egg review”, chances are you will see our pay-per-click ad.

Step #3: Optimize for conversions

The content on your landing pages needs to be optimized for conversions. Having call-to-action buttons that tell people to buy from you isn’t enough. Your content needs to be written in a way that helps encourage people to buy from you.
The easiest way to do this is to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. If someone searched for a list of your competitors, you ideally want that person to land on your site with a matrix that breaks down why your solution is better than the competitions’.
Clicky does a great job of this on their compare page:
clicky comparison matrix
A comparison matrix can quickly show people why your product is better than others’.
Another great example is Demo Duck. When you Google “Demo Duck case study”, you will see Demo Duck’s site with pages, detailing the results their customers got from the company’s service.
crazy egg case study demo duck
As you can see, their case study page breaks down the results Crazy Egg got from using their services. It even tells you how much more money Crazy Egg made. This would have been a perfect example of what to do, except they missed two important things… can you guess what they are? There is no testimonial from the client, which makes it harder for the reader to believe the results. There is also no call-to-action button to urge people to sign up, which means after they read the case study, they won’t know what to do next.
The best way to optimize your landing page conversions when it comes to long tail SEO is to provide the users with the answers they were searching for and then add a call-to-action button that nudges them to sign up or buy.

Conclusion

When you are working on increasing your sales from long tail SEO, you shouldn’t focus on getting as much traffic as possible from search engines. Instead, focus on getting traffic from keywords that you know will cause conversions.
If you look at all of the examples I mentioned above, none of the sites try to rank for random long tail terms to boost their overall traffic; instead, they are focusing their long tail efforts on high converting pages. There may not be a ton of visitors searching for these types of keywords, but they convert really well. I’ve seen them convert as high as 40%.
How else can you use long tail SEO to increase your sales?

No comments:

Post a Comment

How to Find a Profitable Niche in Affiliate Marketing

Head to our eBook Store for valuable digital books on blogging Quite often, you might hear people talk about  affiliate marketing  and t...