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broad vs long tail

by DaleP
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I am trying to rank for a competitve 2 word keyword in the real estate industry 'selling property'.

Am I right in saying that if I rank well for this keyword I will automatically rank well for selling my property, selling your property, selling our property ?

I am doing a large link building campaign and want to know whether it would be good enough ranking for ONLY 'selling property' or whether I need to have links out there which represent each long tail variation of it to cover those too. I am hoping that if I rank for selling property it will cover the long tails autimatically.

Thanks
#broad #long #tail
  • Profile picture of the author TheHutz
    Hi Dale,

    Afraid you won't automatically rank for the additional terms. There are certain words that kinda get excluded like "and", "to" etc.

    My best advice would be to vary your anchor text throughout those phrases and try to include them on your page (without it sounding stupid) to back up your page is about those topics.

    I would maybe add to the mix the following:

    "how to sell my property"
    "tips on how to sell my property"

    But have dedicated information to those phrases.

    Does that help out?
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    • Profile picture of the author DaleP
      well here's the thing...I am using about 1 year'ss worth of adwords data which I find priceless for keyword selection/analysis like this. It's great not only for checking key search volumes but also how well my site converted those keywords to leads/money...

      Ok so...

      My top performing keyword is selling property in the form of phrase match.

      Meaning it ranks highest in the following form of...[some words] selling property [some words]

      So it make sense to me that I should optimize for selling property, and then any keyword containing this keyword would rank fairly well.

      I can understand if 'selling my property' wouldnt rank that well if i optimised for 'selling property' as the word 'my' disects the actual keyword....however Im at least then hoping that if I optimise for 'selling property' that keywords such as...'currently selling property','selling property today' and 'selling property for cash' would do very well as it contains the unbroken phrase 'selling property'


      Is this the case?

      In the same way I am optimizing for 'repossession' hoping to rank well for home repossession,house repossession,repossession crisis etc.
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      • Profile picture of the author TheHutz
        Thats the thing - it kinda works like that.

        But I wouldnt expect to rank automatically just because my SEO efforts are focussing on a keyword phrase close to the others.
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  • Profile picture of the author Smokey_Joe
    It won't automatically make you rank for the long-tails, just like ranking for extended phrases won't embrace the more general terms. Each has to be worked on individually.
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  • Profile picture of the author Shellaine
    Nice strategy there in terms of SEO. I would like to do just what DaleP said. It make sense to me and more likely work well.

    Shellaine
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    Dale, good strategy but you only have half of the picture.

    You have to find out what those [some words] are. Add them as phrase and exact matches.

    One thing I always try to do is to get the largest percentage of my keyword impressions as possible on exact matches. You can only do that by removing the number of hits on short-tail phrase matches, your "selling property" keyword.

    If you are getting 90% of impressions on phrase matches, it doesn't tell you what the [some words] are. If you have a [some words] + "main phrase" keyword that is, say, 25% of the total impressions, now you have learned something you can use more effectively. If you are tracking conversions on those keywords, even better. They usually convert much better. Same for "main phrase" + [some words]. You should also have "selling my property" keywords, maybe people use that phrase more than "selling property".

    You don't mention if you use exact match keywords. Use them. Use longer-tailed keywords too. Never use broads. Never use one-word keywords, avoid two-word keywords.
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  • Profile picture of the author TheCren
    It would make sense for you to try and rank individual pages on your site for the 3-or-more-word phrases. You don't try to rank an entire site for a keyword. Rather each page is an attempt to rank for a single phrase. This gives you more targeted visitors (not joe schmoe browser) and allows you to better focus on what that particular searcher is searching for (someone looking to "sell my house" is different from someone looking to "sell my commercial building," and so forth).
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    • Profile picture of the author DaleP
      Thank you all.

      I understand one should try and get highest % of traffic through exact phrase matches, also that these exact matches should be 'landing page specific' in order to increase conversions.

      'selling property' is in fact an exact match for a fair amount of traffic in my adwords campaign, however the phrase match gets about twice as much traffic, hence me asking my initial question as to whether these long tail keywords would also rank well if I just optimised for selling property.

      What is the best method to find out the long tails of my phrase match 'selling property'...should I just use Awstats which is provided by my web hosting provider?
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    > method to find out the long tails of my phrase match 'selling property'

    There is in Adwords a report called Search Query Report. It shows the actual queries used when people clicked on your ads. Not perfect of course since those who don't click don't show up. It also doesn't show all the search terms used, only those with a certain number so you'll get a lot of "xx unique queries". But it is a tool available to you which can uncover long-tailed keywords and negatives.

    If you use Analytics, it will also give you a good idea of terms used where you can discover long-tailed and negatives. I think the Awstats you mentioned is a log file analytical tool. Failing that, check your own log files. Adwords' keyword suggestion tool can help as well.

    I don't doubt that the exact match "selling property" gets a lot of traffic. Seems to me there could be many meanings to this phrase, but hey, that's how many people do searches.

    You say the phrase match get twice the traffic as the exact. I'd try to reduce that. Maybe the [some words] after the phrase are geographic such as "selling property in mytown".
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