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.

The term ‘long tail’ was first used by marketer Chris Anderson to describe the strategy of finding less-competitive niche market buyers vs. broader markets, that single or two word, short key words will generate. Key words are a corner stone of inbound marketing.

Here at Soap Warehouse we had some very difficult key word problems. First our major market, truck wash chemicals, can be a very large and hard market to find the type of customer we need. For example just searching the word ‘truck wash’ can yield over 400,000 results and will first mainly show only physical Truck Wash locations or businesses. So we needed to add other words.

Here is where you have to start thinking like the person that you hope is out there looking for you, your product or service.

You must choose additional words to add to the others. I tried adding the word ‘chemicals’ but that generates over 700,000 results. Seems like we were moving in the wrong direction, but with this search we can be found, as of this writing, on page 4 and have at times been on page 2 because of key word phrasing. With usually 10 web sites shown per page, being in the top 20-40 of over 700,000 results is not bad. But we did not start there. When I first started here over three years ago this same search would not find us in the first 50 pages! But you need to always strive to make at least the first page if not one of the top three of any search you can. So we started using the key phrases we wanted to be found for in our product descriptions, in our blog posts, printed articles and even in Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. The more times the phrase you want to use is connected with you and back to you the better.

For instance the words ‘best truck wash soap’ was a phrase used back in ’09 that we found was used to find our web site. We learned this from checking our Google analytics for all the key words and phrase that where recorded as bringing someone to our site. When I first checked that phrase in Google we did not show up at all on the first 5 pages so I stopped looking and I did not have any idea how that first person got to us but that was fine. They used a phrase I was sure others where probably using or would use in the future and I wanted to improve our ranking. So I wrote a blog post and an article using that phrase. We shot up to page one almost over night. Since then we have used that phrase in forum posts, and other ways to keep us on the first page. At this writing we are #2 and #5 plus have two other mentions on page one using a combination of these words even though they are not in that exact order. And these posts are not saying we have the best truck wash soaps, which can be seen as boasting or as blowing smoke at a potential buyer, but instead they are telling a potential customer what they should be looking for to find the ‘best truck wash soap’, which hopefully will bring them to check out our web site and try one of our products.

You must first give potential new customers information they want or would like to have before you try to sell them. Most people are turned off by a strong, in your face, use me attitude. Most people want to gather information, learn for themselves and make informed decisions to choose you, your service or product on their own with out feeling pushed into it.

Now what about specific products? Here we also had an issue. Over 17 years ago long before the internet our most popular truck wash was named ‘Brown Derby’ due to its color I guess, I have no idea I was not there, nor would I have chosen that for a name if it was bring introduced today. #1 because the most famous ‘Brown Derby’ was a restaurant in Los Angeles, CA and now is a restaurant in Disney World and other less known locations across the country. So when I first came here if you put in the words ‘Brown Derby’ in Google you came up with pages and pages of listings for articles about the old ‘Brown Derby’ restaurant, their famous ‘Cobb’ salad, ‘Brown Derby’ deserts, Disney World reviews and just about anything else including head wear, but not our ‘Brown Derby’ truck wash. In fact the first mention of ‘Brown Derby’ at all was a link I found to a forum post from back in ’05 that had copied a product description of another product that was mentioned as like ‘Brown Derby’ in it. Not what we wanted.

So when we first changed our web site we included additional words to the ‘Brown Derby’ to help distinguish and target those trying to find our product. Words like ‘brown truck wash’,’ brown soap’, brown derby truck wash etc. This pushed us up into the first page. And even though we are as of this printing sitting at the top spot on page one for ‘brown truck soap’ we are not there for that exact phrase, that is actually held by another companies product in spot #3. We are in #1 out of 9,620,000 results because of our combination of these words, how many times they are used and the relevance that Google placed on our sites listing because of how they were used. Much to the dismay of the company sitting at spot #3 I am sure. See the actual page view:

brown truck soap search

This illustrates that the complete content of your site is important not just the exact key phrase. And believe it our not the #2 spot is being held be a company selling a truck shaped bar of hand soap. This is why you have to constantly be adding new content and tweaking your existing content as new long tail key word phrases are found. Even reposting a blog or tweet can place you back up on top of a search that you may have slipped down the page on.

Here are some great articles that expalins more on long tails and has some great resources; http://www.brickmarketing.com/define-long-tail-keywords.htm, http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php, http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-should-long-tail-keywords-be-targeted-first/28002/, and wordstream has a great tool you can use http://www.wordstream.com/long-tail-keywords

So start researching your long tails and use them to get your self found. I will show you how in our next post.