Here’s a look at a few of Marketplace Earth’s top results in a very competitive industry.  In the specific niche of nursing scrubs and medical uniforms, MPE has provided first page listings in Google for some extremely lucrative phrases.  We are ranking #1 in Google for “Grey’s Anatomy Scrubs”, “Jockey Medical Uniforms” and are #3 for “Cherokee medical scrubs”.  Click here, here, and here to see the results.

Not only do top results bring traffic and sales, but they also bring momentum!  We love working with our parnters at NWScrubs.com because they are taking full advantage of having top of the line SEO specialists working for them.  How?  They are expanding!  NWScrubs has consistently added new categories and brands of scrubs for MPE to work on.  This is an ecommerce match made in heaven.  When you have a motivated ecommerce owner who is busy perfecting their site, adding deep categories of products, and expanding to new lines combined with an SEO partner who is providing thorough keyword research, On Page Optimization and a powerful Link Building Campaign, you get ecommerce gold!  Everyone is happy because the business is flourishing.  We want to have 100 partners just like NWScrubs, because they understand this relationship perfectly.  We love working with motivated owners because it motivates us to perform at a high level.

If you are interested in beginning a relationship like this, sign up on our home page, and we’ll be in contact with you soon.  Let’s work together to get top rankings for your site and drive traffic and sales together!

Let me put it this way, Dustin Woodard performed an investigation and found this out:

“It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic.  Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 percent, and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively.

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic.  There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend.  To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

That’s one long lizard’s tail.  So, to neglect the long tail, you’d have to be crazy!  Here are 2 more great reasons why you should target the long tail:

1. Low Cost.  Low Risk.  - long tail phrases are less competitive and therefore are less costly to capture
2. High Conversion Rates – the more specific a long tail phrase, the more likely the searcher is ready to buy.  Think of a man looking for “men’s shoes”.  Now think of that same man searching for “men’s Nike red running shoes”.  This guy knows what he wants and if you bring him into your site, you may win the sale.

Here’s a great chart to illustrate:

Long Tail Traffic Benefits

Now, the most pressing questions is, “how do I capture long tail phrases?”  Here are a few ideas on where to start from Marketplace Earth:

1. Page Titles – When you sculpt your Meta Titles, don’t simply stop at the head phrases.  Use variations of your keywords to drive long tail traffic.
2. Product Descriptions – This is a huge element.  Take the time to craft unique product descriptions.  It will pay off!  Train your cataloguers to use Wordtracker and other search tools and use variations of the keyword when writing the descriptions.  If at all possible, get this content on your key, category landing pages in the form of short or small descriptions.
3. Blog – This is a simple way to get more and diverse text content on your site.  The search engines will eat it up, and you’ll have more chances to drive the long tail.

Moral to the story, don’t neglect the long tail!  It’s a powerful force and will help you bring in more traffic and sales to your business.

Well, when we begin our initial research, it normally will end up looking like a giant excel sheet of words with no real direction.  We compare numbers from Google Adwords Researcher, Wordtracker and other tools to compose this list, but now we have to narrow it down.  Here are the top three ways we categorize this list, and offer suggestions to you on which phrases are the best:

1. Traffic Volume – Does it have lots of search volume relatively speaking?
2. Intent/Visitor Type – What are people looking for in this search, and are they the person you want to have visit your site?
3. Conversion Rate – Will a visitor on this particular keyword phrases lead to a sale?

We also recommend running trial campaigns through PPC to give you valuable data on search phrases, the intent of the visitor and if it will convert.  With solid data on these three factors, you can priortize what was once a list of random information into Low, Medium and High priority phrases to target.

Keyword research is critical to the success of your SEO campaign.  Don’t neglect this stage of the process!