Industrial SEO Newsletter Articles Archive

Industrial sites receive a lot of their search engine traffic through long tail searches.  A long tail search is typically four to eight words long and is very specific.  For example, “laser cutting” would not be considered a long tail search, but “metal laser cutting Milwaukee WI” would be. You don’t optimize for these keywords in the traditional sense through your title tags, header tags, and keyword saturations.  Instead, you optimize through content creation. 

There are two trends going on that make optimizing for long tail searches particularly important. The first is that the web is getting more competitive every day.  It’s becoming more challenging to get a top 10 ranking on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for the most competitive keywords.  To illustrate, here are the number of competing pages in Google for a few of top industrial keywords:

water jet cutting - 14,700,000
sheet metal fabrication - 12,300,000
cnc machining – 1,590,000
temperature controllers – 6,340,000
welding equipment – 2,600,000

The other trend is that people have become savvier with their keyword searches and are using more long tail searches.  Here are the latest search trends according to HitWise.

The length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, have increased 9 percent between February 2009 and February 2008. Searches of eight or more words increased 20 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries — those averaging one to four words long — have decreased 2 percent. Searches of two words comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 23.47 percent of all queries. Visit HitWise to see more. 

This trend shows a great opportunity for more traffic from long tail searches moving ahead. The best way to optimize for this traffic is through steady content creation on your website. It doesn’t matter whether you add more copy to existing pages or create new pages, both will increase the number of long tail searches to your site.

Another benefit of long tail searches is that they convert better than broader search terms.  Let’s revisit our earlier comparison and say you are a company based in Milwaukee that specializes in custom laser metal cutting. Someone searching for “laser cutting” may very well be looking to purchase aluminum die casting services from you. However, they may also be looking for paper laser cutting, laser cutting equipment, diamond laser cutting, and other products or services you don’t offer.  On the other hand, someone searching for “metal laser cutting Milwaukee WI” is much more likely to buy your services.

Put yourself a cut above the competition with regular additions of well-written content! By taking advantage of current trends in long tail search techniques, you can guarantee increased traffic and a sure source of visitors who are more likely to convert on your site than those using traditional (shorter) keyword searches.  If you make a point of adding new copy to your site every month, you should see a steady increase in and traffic and conversions over time. 

Ecreativeworks offers copywriting services if you don’t have the time to do it yourself. Contact us today to get started!