Soap Warehouse Blog

When I say "long tail" I am talking about the key word phrases that you place in your web site pages body copy, photo meta tags and in your blog posts that allows search engines to chose to show your web site page over another.

You first need to weekly or at least monthly research with your available anylitics to find out what current visitors have used for their search words to find you.

Gone are the days of just a few key words working. You need to create complex long tail phrases to help pin point customers directly to you instead of the competition.

And don't be suprised by the phrases you find. Some may be very difficult to figure out how to incorperate into your page copy.

I will go through some of ours to show you what I mean. I knew right away that Soap Warehouse was going to have a hard time with certain key words, especially with product  names. One - because most of the names where too common ie: "Hood Cleaner" for our hood cleaning product or because the name was senominous with something else ie: "Brown Derby" like the restaurant of old in LA or currently at Disney World. Or "Top Gun" our aircraft cleaner with the same name as the movie.

Because of this right away we had to use multi key word phrases "Top Gun aircraft cleaner" "Brown Derby truck wash" "Hood Cleaner kitchen exhaust cleaner". But these will not help if people are not actually using them to search with. More often we would see that our top search results where things like: "brown soap", "truck soap", "aircraft soap", "sodium hydroxide cleaner" but even these would bring in very low numbers because too many sites had simular key word phrases.

So we constantly are adding long tails we knew people had used to find us like: "acid cleaners for aluminum", "best degreaser for chinese kitchen grease", "algea cleaner for gloeocapsa magma". You have to take these phrases and go into your page content and match the phrase word for word to gain the maxium effect.

For instance the part of the discription we had for "Hood Cleaner" read "This product has a good performance history in Chinese restaurants." That phrase now reads "This is our best degreaser for chinese kitchen grease." See how we incorporated the long tail search phrase into the body copy. Now the next time someone searches that same phrase we have a much better chance of being the first page to show up for that.

For the phrase "algea cleaner for gloeocapsa magma" we wrote a blog post on the topic and included that phrase in the text.

Even using long tail phrases in free on line directory sites can bring you targeted searches especially for your local area. This is not something we do since we do not try to get just local business but for contrators limited to a specific geographic location it can be key to new business. For example if you would like to have more clients in an affluent area, like Brookhaven here in Atlanta, you might list or showcase some before and after photos with the photo named and meta tagged as "Spectacular house wash in Brookhaven". Then when someone in Brookhaven searches for "house washing Brookhaven" you will be at or near the top of the list.

I will give you a short lesson on how to use your Google Analytics. First is if you haven’t already go to https://www.google.com/analytics and sign up to get your code and embed it on your web site so Google can track you. If you had someone else create your site they should have already done this so hopefully you have plenty of data to look at. But you can even start with as little as one month or one week of data.

Above you will see our data from the last week.

Here we will focus on just the top 10 key word searches to find long tails. 

We will ignore the #1 'soap warehouse', #3 'soapwarehouse' and #6 'the soap warehouse' because they had to know about us already to use these. #2 is a good one to start with 'best degreaser for Chinese'. Even though it did not get us great results it lets us know what people that are searching, are interested in, so we now have the opportunity to give it to them and improve our results and possible conversions into sales. Same thing with 'how to remove extra heavy grease from kitchen equipment' which is an extremely long 'long tail' yet there were 4 searchers that used that exact term just this week, although it could have been the same person using the same search to find us again. Since these two long tails fall in the same kitchen hood cleaning category it tells me I should look to use these terms in our permanent product description on our web site or to create a blog post or article about this subject. Or since this long tail did find us it is possible we have already done one of these things right. The way to tell? Copy the phrase into Google and see what comes up!

So when checking the first one 'best degreaser for Chinese' we do not show up on the first page but are #1 on Page 2 of about 469,000 results, so 11 out of 469,000 is not bad but we want improvement. This link goes directly to our Kitchen cleaning product page which is right where we would like some one to land vs. a home page where they would then have to click into the site to find what they would want. But here is where some detective work comes in. Go back and pull up each of the first three listings to see why they ranked higher for that long tail.

The first one brings me to a company that resells cleaning products. Not even one on the first page talks about how it will clean Chinese grease, but it might be in there some where. So nothing I can use from this site. On to the next. Which is an article entitled 'Home remedies to Remove Sticky Grease from Stoves and Kitchen Appliances'. This shows the power of a blog post and it didn't even mention the word 'Chinese' at all. Just because it used the words grease, degreaser and best so much Google gave it high relevance points that pushed it up in the ranking. Now to #3, this is one to focus on, first it is a site for a competing product 'Bonzi' hood cleaner. Pay close attention to the wording that Google found to rank it this high. We would need to improve on theirs to be able to get better results. DO NOT do what some people do and just copy ranking text so you will be right under them on the page. Remember you want to be first, not just one of others. They only mention 'Chinese grease' two times on this page, so we would need to increase on that number or match the words 'degreaser for Chinese' exactly like the searcher did for Google to rank our page higher. If we go and make these changes and then give it a week we should see our page rank improve if not pass Bonzi. But we don't just want one spot on page 1, we want more, we should also write a blog on this subject using these exact words plus ones found on our site and the Bonzi site to rank higher than the Bonzi site alone.

Let us now move to the other very long, long tail, 'how to remove extra heavy grease from kitchen equipment'. This gives us some hope, we are now seen on page one in spot #7. The article 'Home Remedies’; has moved up to #1 and Bonzi is no where to be seen even to page 5 but there are lots of other competiters around. Again shows how blog posts work especially when it uses so many of the key words multiple times. #2 links to a site called Thrifyfun. It is a Q&A site, one of many that can really add to your ranking. When you find these connected to your key words you should really think about joining them and adding your voice to the conversation. Same with forums, the more you show that you are willing to help and educate the public or with other contracors the higher your creditability climbs.

#3 is the eHow web site. Again this is a great one to join and where to post how too information. This does not mean teach a potential customer how to do your job but educate them in how to choose a contractor, how to increase their homes value - with your type of service, how to spot a problem that a professional contractor like you should be called to fix for them, etc. eHow has some good and not so good articles and videos, do a search on their site for key words that pertain to you and see what you might be able to improve upon or to comment on to clear up any incorrect information.

#4-#6 are competitors and like before when you find these, read what they say and try to improve upon it on your own site to move up your ranking.

I hope this demo helped and that you have a better idea of how to find and move up to #1 for your key word phrases.