5 replies to this topic

[leanneorr]

I have a task to look at a website and do some research with regards to long tail.
The website is a hosting company that specialise in a few services such as dedicated server hosting, colocation hosting, managed hosting and a lot more.

Basically, I used the main services as a starting point for my long tail research. So, "dedicated server hosting" and this was high competition with around 38 million pages results on google. I then narrowed it down to location and entered "dedicated server hosting UK" and this again, is high competition but it totalled to around 3 million page results on google.

The question is, is it that important to avoid those keywords that are deemed "high" competition by google? What exactly is low competition? I''m struggling with this, as all of the terms i was hoping to use like "managed hosting services" or "managed hosting UK" are all high competition, if i go looking for lower competition keywords they start to become less relevant to the services that that company has... and writing content around something which is not relevant may become difficult.

Am i looking into googles "high, medium and low" competition too much here? And are the pages returned worth looking at, as i've been using this as a guide line.

I really want this job, I hope someone can point me in the right direction with some advice about this, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!

Lea

[Jill]

Unfortunately, in some industries such as web hosting all the keywords are highly competitive.

[leanneorr]

Unfortunately, in some industries such as web hosting all the keywords are highly competitive.

Thanks Jill, i've noticed this and im using market samurai to see which ones are most competitive. Problem is, that I still have to offer recommendations for long tail. I wonder then if it is best to focus on location. When google keyword tool give the result "-" for all fields does this mean that no one has searched using this term? Im thinking of trying dedicated server hosting leeds, but i just get back the result of a - dash. If this means no one is searching with those keywords then i wont bother.

Not sure how to give recommendations for such a highly competitive industry. The backlinks for the competitors for long tail are in the thousands.

[smc_online]

If this means no one is searching with those keywords then i wont bother.

It means that not enough people are using the term in question. That can also mean that no one is looking for the service using the term. Those that see this as a "glass that is half full" would translate that result as "low hanging fruit."

[Jill]

Problem is, that I still have to offer recommendations for long tai

No keyword research is really necessary for long tail content. Just write about stuff that your target audience will be interested in and within that content you'll have hundreds of keyword phrases you didn't even know existed. Just check your web analytics and you'll see people getting to the content by the phrases you're naturally using.

The key is that the content has to be interesting, helpful, useful and informative to the people who might be in the market for your products/services.

Also, long tail keywords, by their very nature will never show up in keyword research tools because they're...well...they're long tail! That means only 1 or 2 people a month or year ever search for them.

Read my article on longtail keywords for more info.

[sergiuliano]

Thank you for the answer Jill.

So the recommendation is to have our own longtails, not to use any keyword tool for this ? The idea is pretty cool as I was using keyword tools all the times for choosing which keywords shall I SEO for.

This method gives a totally new perspective as, if we get them from our own analytics system, probably we already rank on top positions for those longtails and will be much easyer to rank on the first one with small SEO eforts.