We decided to team up with Scott and collaborate on our first response: “How B2B companies can unlock the value of online marketing.” In it, we highlight a fairly simple and proven path to create a solid B2B marketing campaign online from the ground up.

Over the next few months, we will be updating and expanding on these concepts (both for the specific white paper campaign, as well as bringing in more aspects of the online marketing ecosystem). Check back here at the Chicago Style SEO blog or at the Leff Communications blog for our ongoing discussions.

What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are words or phrases (yes, the word “keyword” doesn’t just mean one word?it can mean a phrase) that people do not search for very often; they are unique turns of phrase that are not the most commonly used keywords to find a product, service, or piece of information through a search engine.

For example, if you were searching for a new mountain bike, “mountain bike” would likely be the most common keyword.  An example of a long tail keyword would be, “mountain bike with SRAM drivetrain under 21 lbs.”

But why are they called “long tail?” Maybe an example would explain it best. Imagine you own a sushi shop in Chicago and you want to get more customers to visit your web page by finding you easily in the search engines. The best way to fine tune your site is to find out what people are searching for when they are looking for sushi in Chicago. So, you turn to Google AdWord’s keyword tool, type in “Sushi in Chicago” and it spits out 650 keywords that are similar or related.

As you would expect, there are several keywords that are most often searched for: “sushi chicago,” “sushi restaurant chicago,” “best sushi chicago” to name a few. They are searched for tens of thousands of times a month. In the graph below, they are the long blue lines to the left. And, most importantly, these are the main keywords that you need to make sure your site focuses on. These keywords should be in your headers, URLs, and page titles.

Sample Graph of Long Tail Keywords

You also need to be aware that you figured this out pretty quickly and easily…all your competitors are likely doing the same thing! They know these are the important keywords and they are working to make sure their websites draw traffic from those keywords as well.

You Still Haven’t Explained Where Long Tail Comes From…

I’m getting there! In addition to the major keywords, Google AdWords gave you a list of hundreds and hundreds of keywords related to “sushi in Chicago” but are only searched for 50 times a month?or maybe only 3?for example, “fresh maguro in chicago,” and “sushi restaurant with fresh ground wasabi.” When you look at the graph to the right, these keywords are those to the right of the graph where the number of searches per month is approaching zero…and if you use your imagination, it looks like a long tail. Yep, simple as that. They are called long tail keywords because they make the graph look like it has a long tail.

What Good Are Long Tail Keywords?

Often-searched-for keywords like “sushi chicago” are  heavily competed for. They are popular and therefore everyone wants to control them. This competition makes it difficult to get your web site to rank in the top few sites in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, not many shops are likely fighting to control “fresh maguro in chicago” so it is quite a bit easier to be at the top of the SERPs for it. You will likely only get a few hits a month for it, but if you are the only shop in town that talks about your fresh maguro, those people are searching for it are more likely to head your direction.

This is the key to long tail keywords?you will get less traffic from each long tail keyword, but you can rank for them more easily and you are likely to convert a much higher percentage of them.

How Do I Begin to Rank for Long Tail Keywords?

This is where blogs come in and are really handy. It’s really easy to put a post on your sushi shop’s blog proclaiming that you have fresh maguro in Chicago. Is it likely that your competitors have “fresh maguro in Chicago” anywhere on their web sites? Probably not. That means you will likely be at the top of the search results when people search for that phrase.

The beauty of blogs is that as you write about what you do, you are likely to unwittingly begin putting together the combinations of words that people don’t search for often, but do search for. And, since you are the only site that does have that unusual combination of words, your page will rise to the top for that phrase.

There are other ways to get long tail keywords onto your site: you can add static pages to the site, edit those static pages, and you can even add PDFs with the keywords in them if you do it well.

Long Tail Keywords Create Site Authority

When you start to rank for more and more long tail keywords, your site begins to acquire a level of authority with the search engines on the topic of your site. This means that the search engines trust you when you are writing on your topic. That makes it easier for you to begin to try to rank for middle-volume keyword (those that are searched for hundreds or thousands of times a month). So, long tail keywords can eventually help you begin to rank for even the high-volume keywords.

More Blog Posts Mean More Keywords and That’s Better for Business…Usually

Ranking for one long tail keyword isn’t going to make your business thrive. You need to rank for dozens and perhaps hundreds of them before you begin to see an impact in your web traffic. And this is why regular, consistent blogging is so critical for most businesses. The blog is a long tail keyword generator.

But as SEOmoz pointed out a couple of days ago, there is an upper limit. If your site has hundreds of thousands of pages, Google may decide to not index the whole site. For most of us, this is the least of our concerns. For this to be a concern, you need to have thousands upon thousands of pages on your site. If you are an amazingly dedicated blogger trying to get some long tail keyword traffic, there’s no way you’re going to bump your head on this limit. This problem is the problem of enormous web sites and/or spammers who are auto-generating tens of thousands of pages a day.

Wrapping Up This Long Tail Maki Roll

Long tail keywords are good for business. Do some keyword research, find some keywords that get some traffic but are not on any of your competitors’ sites. Make sure to get those keywords onto your site somehow?the easiest way is a blog. You can keep track of all of this using website analytics software like Google Analytics. Once you’ve started to rank for a lot of long tail keywords, start moving up to middle-level traffic keywords and trying to rank for them. After some success in the middle, you’ll have an easier time ranking for the high-volume keywords as well.

Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience.

Since then, Google has worked to expand the role of universal search in many ways.  The importance of universal search in SEO simply cannot be overstated, and it is only likely to become more important in the future.

What is Universal Search?

People often don’t realize that Google actually has a number of search engines: blogs, books, video, etc.  These are known as “vertical” search engines.  As Danny Sullivan puts it:

Regular search – when you go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask or any general-purpose search engine – is a “horizontal” search in that you are searching across a wide spectrum of material. Information from sports sites, news sites, medical sites, shopping sites – the entire horizontal spectrum of topics is represented.

With vertical search, you slice down vertically through one topic area. You search only against the news sites or against the medical information, for example. This type of focus can make for more relevant results.

In many ways, a regular Google search was always “universal” in that it contains much of the same information, they key differences are the way the information is ranked and the manner it is displayed.  Traditional search is ranked by backlinks and on-site factors that show relevance to the query, vertical searches have a whole set of other factors such as price (for products) or newness (for news).  On the display side, you will always see a list of web page titles and descriptions for traditional search, while with verticals this would not always make sense (think images).

Universal search takes the traditional search results and adds in the vertical results.  This has taken on many forms, from the traditional OneBox at the top of the search results page, to expanded OneBoxes and blended results.  Over time, Google has been adding the number of universal results as well as the frequency.

For example, at the time of this writing, if I do a search for chicago seo I see a results page dominated by a map with 10 local listings, and then 10 regular results with an additional news listing blended in.

Categories of Google Vertical Search Engines:

1. Web Search
2. Local Search (Maps)
3. Product Search
4. Google News
5. Video Search
6. Image Search
7. Blog Search
8. Book Search
9. Patent Search
10. Scholar Search

And I am sure there are plenty more in various stages of development and use.  The categories on Google Base might give some clues as to what is in the pipes.

Impact on Search Marketing:

Blended results began as mostly subtractive, meaning they “bumped” a natural search result off of the page they were on, keeping the total results at ten.  Today blended universal results are additive, meaning there are always ten natural results with the addition of whichever universal results are deemed worthy.

Even with the additive results, many internet marketers are understandably upset.  Overnight, you may see your very good and hard fought #3 ranking turn into the equivalent of a #6 ranking, or even worse.

While you may not particularly like these changes, a smart marketer will adapt to realities instead of rallying against what we can’t control. The good news is that Google universal search offers quite a few opportunities to large and small organizations (and individuals) who use them effectively.

1. The first thing to remember is that the verticals themselves are often used directly.  This number may be tiny compared to regular search, but still significant enough to be worth the effort.
2. Because the verticals are often evaluated quite differently, a website with significantly less resources and exposure can often achieve the equivalent of a “first page” ranking in the SERPs, bypassing extremely competitive areas.
3. There are opportunities to literally dominate results pages.  It wouldn’t be unheard of to have a double regular listing, an Adwords listing, and one or two extras from universal results.  Add in a site-wide listing and a sub domain or two and, well, you see where I am going…

How to get Indexed in Verticals:

Over the next few weeks, I will be detailing how to get indexed in vertical search engines as well as exploring the best ways to improve rankings in each.