Newbie question about long tail keywords

[mogsta22]

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.

[Carlos-R]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[mogsta22]

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.

[mogsta22]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[igor.pinchevskiy]

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!

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Marcus, thank you so much for the suggestions, they are excellent!!!

[LindaSchumacher]

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!