Increasing conversion rates through long tail search

How can you attract more visitors to your site that are further along the buying cycle and therefore more likely to convert into a sale?

A common question that perplexes many online marketers is how can you attract more visitors to your site that are further along the buying cycle and therefore more likely to convert into a sale?

In my previous article on Consumer roles in online decision making, I explained the differing needs of explorers, hunters, trackers and transactors and how your site should accommodate for them. Trackers and transactors are the most valuable people, they have either made a decision to purchase or are close to it. If we can attract more of these people, to our site, we’ll have a much higher chance of conversion.

You can achieve this by targeting long-tail keywords for your internet marketing efforts (SEO and PPC). Long tail keywords are 3 to 5 keyword phrases that are much more specific to the product or service that you are selling. These search phrases are used by people who are further along the decision making process and therefore much more likely to convert.

To illustrate this, let’s summarise a typical buying process:

1. Explorers have a need and are searching for options. They don’t yet know what kind of product/service they are looking for.
2. Hunters have narrowed down there search and are now looking to narrow it down further by identifying a specific product/service (e.g. a specific model number)
3. Trackers know the specific product/service they are going to buy and are now looking for the best deal. Metaphorically, they have their wallet at the ready.
4. Transactors have made the decision to buy. They pull out their card and complete the transaction.

With long tail search, you are specifically targeting people at step 3. This makes a great deal of sense as it’s much easier for you to get higher rankings for these 3 to 5 word key phrases as your not competing with the 1 or 2 word phrases that are 1) dominated by the big guys out there and 2) can be sending heaps of the wrong kind of people to your site.

Just by way of example, consider a tourism business in Christchurch, New Zealand that specialise in guided adventure tours for extreme mountain bikers. If they were to optimise their internet marketing for things like Travel, Travel NZ, Christchurch Tours and so on, not only will they be competing with the big, well established travel sites in NZ (and therefore unlikely to rank highly at all), they will also be attracting people to their site who have little chance of converting, such as an over 50’s couple looking for a cultural tour of the city.

A much better way of targeting visitors who are further along the buying cycle is to use much more specific search phrases that they would typically be searching for.

For example, these people would be searching for:

• Advanced Mountain Bike Tours New Zealand
• Adventure Mountain Bike Tours Christchurch
• Guided Mountain Bike Tours Christchurch
• Guided MTB Tours Christchurch

This is just a few examples here, the list of potential phrases would potentially be quite long. In order to rank well for these specific search phrases you need to create specific landing pages for each of them. This can sound daunting and it’s probably why very few sites do it. It takes thought, time and effort.

Now, here’s the really important bit. Each landing page you create needs to have completely unique title and description meta tags, as well as unique h1 header tag and content that emphasises the unique search phrase for that page. It’s actually not hard, it just takes your time and effort to do it. And yes, it may result in you having dozens, if not hundreds of landing pages. The good news is that search engines such as Google and Yahoo like sites that have more pages as they appear to be more substantial and relevant.

To do this effectively, the phrases need to be relevant to your prospective customers. Use keyword research tools such as those available at Google, Overture and Wordtracker but use them with caution. It’s tempting to focus on search phrases that these tools suggest as being popular. Popular searches are also generic searches and not targeted search phrases which is what you are looking for.

Also, use web analytics software to determine what search phrases were most successful in attracting visitors that convert into customers.