Analyzing search terms can tell you how to increase search engine traffic for your websites.
So you’ve got some decent traffic coming from search engines. Using our search term analysis tool, you’ve even grouped your search terms, ranked them by search hits and got yourself a nice Long Tail chart showing a power curve. Now what?
As shown earlier, a perfect search term popularity distribution will show a straight line when plotted on logarithmic axes. In an ideal world that is, since real world examples often look more like the yellow dotted curve in the graph below:
So instead of a straight line you will probably observe a line that bends at some point. The good news: this is a strong indicator that your website has significant potential for an increase in search engine traffic! The bad news: you don’t know whether the ideal distribution of your search term popularity should really look like line ‘P’ or line ‘C’.
Drooping tail
Let’s assume it is line ‘C’ (for Content): This means that your search engine traffic lacks ‘Long Tail’ search terms that only get a few search hits each. In the example above some 60 unique search terms are missing: line ‘C’ ends at 100, the yellow dots at 40 unique search terms.
Search term popularity is measured in search hits, so in this case there’s an upside potential of maybe 100 to 150 search hits waiting for the webmaster to tap into. The action to be taken is simple (well, sort of…): add more content relevant to your website’s topic.
Headless site
If your site has tons of content that attracts search hits for many unique keyword combinations, line ‘P’ (for Popularity) is more likely to describe your ideal search term popularity distribution. This means that your site lacks a couple of highly popular search terms that bring in a lot of visitors.
In the chart above the first eight search terms (represented by yellow dots) are underperforming in terms of search engine traffic compared to line ‘P’. The most popular search term only gets 100 search hits when it should get 600 hits as line ‘P’ suggests.
All in all this site is missing out on about 800 search hits! What can be done: getting strong quality backlinks that are related to the site’s topic would be a good place to start to increase rankings for the site’s more competitive search terms. Also apply the whole range of other search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to push the site to the top of the search engine result pages.