Long Tail SEO Success: A Case Study

Ten years ago, a leading law firm in Sydney embarked on an SEO strategy that has since driven highly valuable traffic to its site.

This case study delves into how long-tail keywords have worked in their favour.

If you discovered a way to attract 7,000% more visitors to your business website and increase your conversation rate by 700%, by adding high-quality and engaging blog content, how quickly would you take up that opportunity? It’s a level of change that could have quite an impact on turnover.

Our client, a leading law firm in Sydney has done exactly that over the past 10 years. The good news is that we have agreed to share the content strategy and results with our readers.

The long-tail keyword strategy

Ten years ago, we decided to target long-tail keyword phrases (and topics arising from these phrases) for the law firm’s website. These were long-tail phrases and topic areas that were already bringing some traffic to the website, but as the site wasn’t ranking high in the organic search results for those phrases, the number of visitors arriving via those keywords was low.

We call these “under-performing” long-tail keywords and topic areas.

Long-tail keyword phrases can be thought of as specific keyword terms and phrases that are very high value to a business – but not searched for very much, maybe only a couple of times a month, maybe not even that.

But when they are searched, if you can drive the search traffic to your website, then they are hugely valuable to you.

Now imagine ranking in the top 3 for thousands of these, or even hundreds of thousands of these?

The goal is to own all types of long-tail searches in your particular niche, in our client’s case, particular law content.

The strategy: to post at least 5 items each week to the client blog, incorporating long-tail keywords into the posts and/or writing about topic areas that were prevalent within the long tail.

Together with the above-mentioned content activities, the client also embarks on a comprehensive SEO and digital strategy including on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, PR, and social media marketing. This in combination with their off-line marketing activities has positioned them as a leading law firm in Australia.

The results

• For the past 10 years, organic traffic to the site has increased by 7,000%
• For the past 10 years, organic conversions for non-branded keywords have increased by 700%

Explanation of how & why this SEO strategy works

By producing high-quality copy about these underperforming long tail phrases and topic areas, in most cases (over 90%), they increase in rank from page 2 and beyond to Google page 1. Due to the improvement in rank, consistent content creation utilising these long-tail phrases results in an increase in targeted organic traffic.

Long-tail phrases tend to show a higher conversion rate than competitive primary phrases – this is because they’re more targeted.

So not only will consistent content creation around long-tail phrases (and topics) increase your organic traffic, but it will also increase your conversion rate and bottom line.

I must emphasise the importance of always writing for your audience and producing high-quality and useful content. It’s no good producing content just for the sake of targeting long-tail phrases. It must be content that your audience wants to read and engage with.

Used this way, content can also have the effect of positively building your brand’s authority and attracting new customers.

Great content also attracts PR coverage, and social signals through social engagement, and provides ‘naturally occurring’ backlinks (external sites linking back to your site content) – so it has the capacity to continually improve your site SEO.

It’s important that in all of this, you exercise patience and have realistic expectations. You still have to market and promote your content and provide value. That may take years, but eventually, you’ll see your efforts pay off.

It should also be emphasised that a well-rounded marketing strategy (both digital and offline) be included with your SEO and content activities.

What to do…

To find out more about using long-tail keywords or to get affordable help with your SEO, contact us.