I'm working with a client focused on improving his SEO for a large news site. Does anyone have experience tracking many long-tail keywords? What would be the best way to provide keyword data?
netmeg
12:30 pm on Jun 1, 2015 (gmt 0)
I don't do much keyword tracking anymore, but when I do, I use one of the paid tools. Here's one of the recent tools threads for recommendations:
Andiamo, what do mean specifically by "tracking keywords"...
- checking referrer keywords? - checking rankings? - checking competitor data to see what keyword phrases competitors are ranking and bidding on?
Referrer keywords are very often no longer available.
Checking rankings has become more about checking a range of rankings over time. Understand that location plus personalization and user intent are also fuzzing things even further.
Regarding competitive rankings and targeting...
As netmeg mentions in our Google forum tool thread... SEMRush is an excellent source of competitive information (and I'll toss in SpyFoo for that purpose as well). I've found that both, though, have difficulties with long tail information. Both tools rely on sampled data that needs to occur frequently enough to register in the accumulated database, and they've got more accumulated data for competitive, frequently searched terms. In any query area, they get better over time... but data for extremely long-tail queries isn't going to accumulate overnight.
The WebmasterWorld free tools are more compilations of suggestions the engines offer, based on historical searching patterns. There's a Keyword Suggest Tool which offers sampled data from all the major autocomplete tools... so it may give you some excellent long-tail ideas, but it's not possible to numerically quantify the searches, or for that matter even to put all of them into relative order.
WebmasterWorld also has a free Google Adwords Keyword Tool... which is limited by data Google releases. It does attach some very approximate monthly numbers to give you an idea of potential AdWords searches, but, again, you aren't likely to find any really long-tail data.
None of these are going to give you data on queries for news content, though, as that's going to change over time. If it's a niche news site, some query vocabulary is going to recur, but I would think likely not.
In any event, IMO, exact match long-tail data isn't a very fruitful way to target any more. It hasn't been for quite a while. Longtail SEO is not about creating content to match exact long-tail variations. An understanding of the kind of vocabulary that searchers use is going to be a great help here, of course... so it may be helpful to use what tools you can to get started... but I think that SEOs will need to understand the range of concepts and information and support that users and customers are going to want over time... and that the site then needs to address those issues. That's going to take a familiarity with the marketplace and what the site is offering.
In the case of a news site, that involves being on top of the news story and its developments, anticipating where a story and a topic might go over time.
And ultimately, in calibrating and evaluating what you've done, traffic and analytics are going to be much more helpful than longtail keyword rankings.
vlexo
9:14 am on Jun 2, 2015 (gmt 0)
Check out Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools), in the Search Analytics page. That gives a list of keywords your site ranks for, including actual clicks from the SERPs to your site etc. With that data you'll be able to download longtail keywords. Whilst it does give you only the top 1,000 keywords, if you delve deeper, you can extract way more than 1,000 keywords from the tool itself. You simply need to make changes to the filter and it'll give you the top 1,000 for that filtered view - so there's a lot you can do with that.
Andiamo
10:34 am on Jun 2, 2015 (gmt 0)
Robert - I agree that query segmentation is the way to go as opposed to tracking individual long-tail keyword rankings. But are there any other products out there other than Keylime Toolbox that do that? I haven't seen anything...
