If you’ve been reading SEO tips in the last couple years, you’ve probably heard how you need to optimize for the “long tail” of search. Every SEO “expert” under the sun has strategies for capturing the long tail in your market (including Patrick McKenzie, a no-quotes, honest-to-God expert, in posts like “Strategic SEO for Startups“). What no one ever talks about, though, is how you’ll know if your efforts are paying off.
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| Measuring the effect of long-tail SEO in Google Analytics |
How can you measure how effective your site is at capturing long-tail queries? How valuable is long-tail SEO for your site?
(If you haven’t been inundated with talk of the long tail, you’ll first want to read “What is the Long Tail of Search, and Why Does It Matter?“. I promise, it really does matter for your business.)
How do you measure your site’s performance in the long tail?
Before you start trying to optimize for the long tail queries, you should figure out how your site is doing currently in the long tail. Doing so will let you know how much your long-tail SEO efforts pay off.
Create a custom segment in Google Analytics just for long-tail searches
Let’s go into your Analytics data and take a look at how your site is doing on long-tail searches.
First, let’s get to the full report on organic search. This will show all keywords that led people to your site, excluding clicks to your site from your PPC ads.
- Go to the Standard Reporting section of the tool.
- Select the Traffic Sources tab on the left side, then expand the Search drop-down.
- Click on the Organic search link.
Now we’re going to create a custom “segment” (a way of dividing up your traffic) to filter out anything that isn’t a long-tail query.
To add a new advanced segment:
- Click the Advanced Segments button near the top of the window.
- Click the New Custom Segment button.
Add a new custom segment in Google Analytics. We’ll use this to look at only the long-tail search terms that led people to your Web site. [Click the image to see it at full size!]
Now we’re going to set up that custom segment to show only search phrases with 3 or more keywords. (If your site’s long tail begins with 2-word phrases, you can do that instead.)
- Name your segment. I chose “3+ keywords.”
- Tell the tool that this segment will be “keyword” based—we’ll include only certain types of keyword searches.
- Tell the tool that we’ll match those keywords based on a regular expression (or “regexp”) and type one of the following regular expressions:
- To match 3 or more keywords: ([A-z]|[0-9])+ ([A-z]|[0-9])+( ([A-z]|[0-9])+)+
- To match 2 or more keywords: ([A-z]|[0-9])+( ([A-z]|[0-9])+)+
- Click the Save Segment button.
Creating the 3-or-more keyword custom segment. This should show only long-tail search results, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your long-tail SEO. [Click the image to see it at full size!]
Note
: If you have a large amount of Analytics data (say, 100,000+ visits for the period you’re currently viewing), this request might time out. You may be able to try again (by clicking Save Segment) and have it successfully complete, but if that won’t work, try selecting a smaller time period to consider.
If anyone has ideas for reducing the complexity of this regular expression, let me know in the comments!
From now on, when you open the Advanced Segments menu (by clicking on its button), you’ll be able to filter out any visits resulting from a short query by checking the box next to your “3+ keywords” segment (or whatever you named it).
Sharing Analytics data from my work on the X-Plane.com site isn’t possible for privacy reasons. However, I can tell you that when I started, X-Plane.com’s long-tail traffic was almost nonexistent—if a visitor didn’t reach the site from a short query (like “x-plane” or “flight simulator”), they probably wouldn’t get there at all. Even the 3+ keyword queries were not truly long tail—they included things like “x plane 10” and “x plane flight simulator”, which are primary terms that X-Plane ranks for. Hopefully I’ll be able to write up the results of our long-tail SEO efforts soon.
Where to go from here
Now that you’ve created a custom segment to look at your site’s long tail queries, you’ll be able to compare your future long-tail performance to the past. The metrics you’ll be particularly interested in are:
- Total visits resulting from these queries (minus the occasional 3+ word search that isn’t really a long tail query).
- Total number of keywords that were matched. (In the lower left of the window, you’ll see something like “1–10 of 18838.” That final number is the number of search terms that match this custom segment.)
- The conversion rate for this segment (probably based on either your ecommerce data or your custom-defined goals). In general, these long tail queries should convert at a much higher rate than the rest of your site, since these visitors are looking for something quite specific—if your site really does fit their needs, they’ll make great customers!
More resources
- HitTail, a tool for discovering long tail keywords that you should probably be targeting based on existing visitors to your site. Install a bit of Javascript to your pages (or, better yet, install their plugin for a major CMS), then in a few days, they’ll have keyword suggestions for you, ranked by the amount of traffic you can expect and how much competition there is. I’ve used this successfully in the past, and it was well worth my money. [Aside: As usual, I’m not compensated in any way for recommending products—I’m just a happy customer!]
This post was written by Tyler Young.
Tyler is the principal consultant for Conversion Insights. His expertise is in turning technical skills—like SEO and copywriting for conversions—into business goals. Contact him at tyler@conversioninsights.net.
This post was published on January 30, 2013, and it was last updated July 16, 2013 at 10:09 am.
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