Increase Google Traffic: Long Tail Content Techniques
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Long tail keywords, when grouped together, can often bring in more traffic than shorter keywords with a lot more competition in the search engines. But how do you attract those visitors? You will need to write long tail content geared to bringing them in. Keep reading to learn how to do this to increase your traffic from Google and the other search engines.
In particular, one website with the following features was examined.
Periodic publishing of content (at least 450 to 500 words per post).
Uses WordPress.
Title tags optimized for the search engines (using targeted keywords in the title) for every post, not only the home page title tag.
Sitewide links optimized for the search engines. The links use the post title tag as the anchor text.
Website has no search engine penalty.
Website has reputable backlinks.
This is the pie chart of the site's traffic distribution:
You might notice that the Google search engine traffic coming from optimized terms targeting the home page only accounts for 17 percent of the site's traffic, as compared to 83 percent coming from the entire website's posts or content.
Another confirmation using another website with the same features as above, but in a different niche, reveals a much more astonishing result as to the effects of long tail traffic to a website:
It shows that the home page only receives 4.10 percent of the website's traffic as compared to the rest of the pages, which are responsible for 95.90% of the traffic.
If you would like to know how the above data are being gathered and analyzed (for similar testing or benchmarking results with your own website), take the following steps:
Log in to your Google Analytics account.
Under “Overview,” click the website under “Website Profiles.”
Under the “Dashboard” sidebar navigation, click “Traffic Sources.”
Under “Top Traffic Sources,” click “Google.”
Export all records (not just the top 10 keywords) to an Excel spreadsheet.
Filter the records coming from the home page (/) and the rest of the pages, sum them up and then analyze.
The sample tabulated results are those shown in the previous screen shot.
As to how these websites manage to get such a high percentage level of long tail traffic, that is the topic and objective of this article.
Common mistakes SEO companies make
One of the obvious mistakes based on the above results is that most SEO companies focus solely on a single optimized page, most commonly the home page. Bear in mind that the two above websites have also optimized their home pages (with links and content). However, one thing that most SEO will ignore are the inner pages. Unfortunately, according to the principle of long tail traffic distribution, this is where most of the traffic will come from.
Instead of focusing on a single page like the home page, why not divert or spread the strategy to the rest of the pages of your website for a much higher overall traffic level? Bear in mind also that the targeted keywords of the two above website home pages rank well, in top 10 positions in Google. But even though they both rank high, the traffic from the inner pages is outperforming the traffic coming to the home page.
So if you are an SEO client, make sure you ask the SEO company about their long term strategy to increase your website traffic. If they focus solely on one page at a time, as opposed to all of the website's pages, then go away; you will end up spending a lot for these campaigns and not getting a high level of traffic from your inner pages.
The conversion rate of your website is still very important, but it takes traffic to convert; so this tutorial discusses how to get a lot of traffic on inner pages instead of focusing on a single page.
The strategy will be very simple. It all starts with the home page but when the time comes to optimize those inner pages, optimizing them one by one is not a good strategy -- instead, we'll implement a more common and generalized optimization strategy.
Google Optimization 
