Newbie question about long tail keywords
-
I am a little confused as to how search engines see and rank keywords. Let me explain.
If I have a fairly long tail keyword such as "buy natural progesterone cream uk" will the search engine also break this up into smaller parts such as "buy natural progesterone uk"," buy progesterone cream uk", "natural progesterone uk" and so on or will it only see the words that are next to each other like "progesterone cream uk".
Also where does cannibalization come into this?
I really appreciate any help I can get with this that furthers my understanding. Thanks.
-
Yes, thank you, Marcus. It's really helpful to learn more about the process and thinking behind the process for developing content that includes long tail search terms that will be relevant to readers and helpful for ranking. Cheers!
-
Marcus, thank you so much for the suggestions, they are excellent!!!
-
Hey, I did about 5 seconds of research.
Google 'progesterone cream' and skimmed over the first few pages. One was an FAQ with some of these questions skim answered on one page. Perfect candidates for creating a better answer on a single targeted page.
Then, I played around with the suggestions that Google.co.uk made for me when I typed in those words in different orders and then googled around those suggestions to get a few others.
Just do some research. Go to blogs, forums, blog comments, see what questions people are asking and if you can give better answers then you have a piece of content.
If you find a common question that has no authoritative answer then that is a great opportunity and remember the old saying: hard answers make for easy links!
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hello Marcus!
Can you please let me know how you found those ideas related to progesterone cream. Did you use Google keyword tool or some other tool(s)? I did a Google search for progesterone cream but it did not return those topics for me. I'm very curious about finding relative keywords for my site. Thank you in advance!
-
Hey Jean,
If you have this content, and it is working and bringing in visitors, then maybe your time would be better spent on some conversion optimisation and funnelling of that traffic into some kind of soft conversions.
Hope it helps!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus,
I wonder if you found my site? Of the 4 (sensible) suggestions you gave I have 3 pages with pretty much those exact phrases as their title and one that is very similar.!
In total I have around 100 pages on the site and am currently attempting to improve the on-page SEO for them in order to drive more traffic to these supporting information pages.
Sounds like I may have a better grip of this than I thought!
Thank you so much for the help and information. It was very useful to me and so reassuring to someone in a world that is somewhat alien to them.
And the cream really is magic! I know 'cos I use it myself and my husband doesn't have to lock up all the knives anymore.
-
Thanks Carlos.
SEOMoz says the domain authority is 44 and page authority is 52
I think the content is highly relevant, I would 'cos I wrote it, So I am looking good on that front then I reckon.
Learning this SEO thing seems to raise more questions than I have answers for but I am getting there slowly I think.
-
Yep, don't try and cram "buy natural progesterone uk"," buy progesterone cream uk" into your text. Google knows you are in the UK and hopefully that you sell progresterone cream.
A better strategy would be to create your product page and then create some content based landing pages to support this page and hoover up traffic looking for information about the product.
A quick Google gave these ideas
-
why do women need progesterone cream
-
how to use progesterone cream
-
how to take progesterone cream
-
what is progesterone cream
-
how to spell progesterone (okay, I made that one up).
But, you get the picture. Have one main page, optimise it and then lots of other pages that support information driven queries that can be used to show an offer for your magic cream and to target a wider range of keywords than the tired old money phrase that everyone is going for. You could even do a free sample or some such incentive to get an email address to keep marketing to these people downstream.
If your information pages are good, they may win some links. You may also be able to build some links to these pages a damn site more easily than to the money page and they will help promote that one for it's targeted phrases.
Hope this helps!
Marcus -
-
The search engine will break it up, whether you rank for the more competitive variations of "buy natural progesterone cream uk" will depend of the page/domain authority your site has and how relevant your content is to those keywords.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword cannibalization
Hi, I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization. 1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations. The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...). My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page? Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content. Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three? 2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related? In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans? In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization? Looking forward to your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
2 pages optimised for same keyword... what should I do?
Hi, I have two pages appearing in positions 11 and 12 for the keyword: 80 btl mortgage. These are: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/btl-mortgage-80-ltv/ https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/ Both pages are good, provide useful information and I would not wish to remove one of them. However, I am concerned that the reason neither one of the pages is on page 1 is because the keywords targeted on both pages is essentially the same. Should I reoptimise one of them for other variations of 80 BTL mortgage keywords? (e.g. 80% LTV Buy to Let Mortgage, 80 Buy to Let Mortgage, etc etc) Or, is there another solution I haven't yet thought of? I welcome your insights! Thanks! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
To merge or not to merge? That is the question.
I am planning to do something I never did, and I am wondering if it's really a good idea or not. I have four websites, all of the same company, each one with a different domain and different content: one has been the main official site for 16 years, 200 unique per month, indexed for 134 keywords, Domain Authority 17, 13 linking root domains one has been used as the main site from 2003 to 2006, it's focused on a specific business they actually discontinued, still online, no update since 2006, 500 unique per month, indexed for 92 keywords, Domain Authority 13, 8 linking root domains another has been a built on 2010 and maintained for less than year, and it's focused on a business they never really started, still online, no update since 2010, 3000 unique per month, indexed for 557 keywords, Domain Authority 25, 84 linking root domains a fourth one has been also built on 2010 and focused on a business never really started, still online, no update since 2010, 100 unique per month, indexed for 4 keywords, Domain Authority 6, 3 linking root domains Each website has traffic and links, all links being natural, they never tried to gain links in any way, they never did on page optimization, they never ever thought about SEO. They are not event interlinked. So, my idea is to merge all of them, putting websites 2, 3 and 4 as subfolders of the main site and replicating the old content there. Because those sites have traffic, incredibly one of the abandoned sites has 3000 unique per month, while the main site just 200! My doubts are: does it make sense to merge everything from a SEO prospective? A part from doing 301 correctly, what else should I be careful to do or not to do? website number 4 it's really outdated, content and structure is not easy to merge with the rest, traffic is really small, is it worth spending the time to merge it? Finally I also have a problem; customer didn't want to merge them, they agreed to, but they don't want visitors of the main site to be able to navigate to the old ones, so once moved and redirected I would have to put them in the sitemap of the main site but avoid linking to them on the actual "main" site. As far as I know google crawler doesn't like to find pages in sitemaps which are not reachable through a linking path on the website, is that correct? Is that going to make all the merging work useless? Should I convince the client to at least put small links in the footer or on a page linked from the footer?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | max.favilli0 -
Why Keyword is not ranking
I have blog website - http://uncutweb.com/ My website ranked for keywords - What Color Shoes To Wear With Gold Dress, Keywords is having Moz Difficulty Score: 35% with A grade moz On page Score. But why my website is not ranked for What Color Shoes To Wear With Purple Bridesmaid Dress or **What Color Shoes To Wear With Coral Dress???**They have less difficulty score and having A grade.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
What keywords should my main page contain ?
Hello. I have a domain with scripts and components for websites, each product page is somehow different and contains different phrases and keywords, for example: a) Flash Photo Gallery
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adrianTNT
b) JavaScript Menu
c) Flash Menu
d) PHP Rating Script
e) PHP Poll script It's kind of clear for me how to optimize keywords on these pages individually, but what would be best content / terms / keywords to use on my main page and main page title and anchor text to my root domain? Should it be a mix of all these keywords mentioned above ? Or is it better to be a general term like "website scripts" ?0 -
Best Keyword Taxonomy Discussion
Sorry to bring this up again but I think the title was very misleading resulting in helpful members ignoring the question/thread completely. Also, I believe this should be in the discussion section, but please correct me if I'm wrong? Hi All, This is my first post and hopefully a question that could help others in similar positions as I haven't been able to find a concrete answer on this anywhere. Say we are trying to rank for the keyword "security testing tools". Product name is "Sectest" and its a security testing tool. *We currently have an "SEO" section that is purely good content and the idea with this is to be able to rank for "security testing tools" talking about what to expect and look for in such tools and relevant content - Linking to our product page at the end of it. structure is brand.com/security-testing/tools and that would have a link to brank.com/products/sectest Obviously product pages would get their meta tags and content re-written so we don't compete for the same keywords. Is this approach optimal? or would google want us to link directly to the product page instead of "information" about security testing tools? Nobody in our sector is taking this approach and we have already started it, but I am starting to wonder if I am getting into big trouble further down the line. Thanks and best regards, 2 Responses<a class="image-button add-response-button"> </a><a name="post-131828"></a> | JorgeGarciaAspirant | about 22 hours ago |JorgeGarcia Just to make it clearer. Our competitors seem to be using "security testing tools" directly in their product pages. We would like to use "security testing tools" for a page with content on it and an introduction to our product and then link to our product page. | <a name="post-131872"></a> | SEO5Journeymen | SEO5Director - Marketing at SEO 5 Consulting Hi Jorge, How are your competitors ranking for their approach by using security testing tools directly. If they are doing well then i would adopt the same strategy and try to beat them with quality backlinks and good on site optimization. SEO is not the only thing you have to worry about , you also should keep conversion rates in mind. By first taking the visitors to a security tools page and then your product page you are increasing your conversion funnel and this might impact your conversion rates. At the end of the day , it's all about sales/revenue/leads/ROI so you dont want to do anything to jeopardize your conversions. That one extra step that the visitor has to take might result in fewer conversions. <a class="image-button add-response-button"> </a> | <a name="post-131946"></a> | JorgeGarcia |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JorgeGarcia
JorgeGarcia Hi there, Although I do understand your reasoning, we have the resources and people quantity to focus on all things at once being a big a company. So at the present moment it wouldn't be a matter of prioritizing work - but rather - delivering the best future-proof strategy. I don't mind doing the same as our competitors, but sometimes stepping out of the sheep line is good. You do make a great and very valid point addressing that this is an extra step for the visitor and could lead to fewer conversions. This is holding me back a little bit. But, if properly implemented, wouldn't a content focused site rank way better than a product page would? I guess the real question is if prospects would really find value in the information about "security testing tools" or they would rather just get the product page instead. But just looking from Google eyes, what do you think of this approach? _After re-reading my post I realize I might sound as if all I want is you to agree with me and justify my approach, I don't really. I would really value any honest thoughts and reasoning 🙂 _ |0 -
Question on starting again after being penalised for bad links
Hi, in a scenario where you have been heavily penalised for bad links but the quality of your site is good, If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start? Any advice or experience with this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | em_welsby1 -
Crazy long weird URLs... help
I have a HTML website, mysite1.com, and I placed a link on the home page to another one of my sites, mysite2.com Today I checked the links to mysite2.com in Majestic and noticed 24 links coming from the mysite1.com instead of just one link. The URLs from mysite1.com that are showing in Majestic are like this mysite1.com/?epl=4donafvFK3fMXxZXMWQRQLodmPchoXCK5C7-kbBv_agkwlkJrZAoaSDVUlhqFmUqt0f8c2Q6jF6GO6DNMnbidqRsikriF-IEBEt5okmICLEB0FxP36GrsxoPGQ3SGBo1PVR7itDUA4CYmjypn5gi mysite1.com,was inherited from a friend and I believe that it was originally built in Frontpage. Can you tell me how I can get rid of these multiple links as I only want 1 showing from the home page Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0