Leaving Work Behind

My First Niche Site: Update #4 – The Power Of The Long Tail

Tom Ewer

This is Part #4 of a series. A list of all the other updates can be found at the bottom of this post.

Please note that Modeling For Kids is no longer an active site. If you’d like to know why I shut down the site and started up a new one, click here.

If you read my last niche site update then you will know that I was beginning to get frustrated by my apparent lack of progress in climbing the Google rankings. In fact, I seemed to be going backwards!

Fortunately, I am now in a position to inform you of some progress. Modest progress, but progress nonetheless!

My Niche Site’s Key Statistics

As you can see, I am now ranking #9 in Google for my main keyword, “modeling for kids”. In fact, I briefly flirted with 8th position. With a continuation of my backlinking strategy I expect to see the rise continue.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may spot that my average visits per day has increased by 6 since update #2. I have been at #9 in Google for just a few days, but the increase in traffic is notable. As would be expected, the specific keyword “modeling for kids” is now getting a fair bit of action (with 18 searches in the last seven days).

What is really interesting though is the fact that I am getting lots of long tail keyword searches bringing traffic to my site. This is something you should absolutely expect from an “authority” site, but it bears considering in detail.

The Power Of The Long Tail

I read a great article this week over at Niche Pursuits – How To Calculate Projected Traffic And Earnings For A Niche Website. Although I have been aware of the power of long tail keywords for some time, Spencer takes it one step further and argues that you should consider the potential revenue from them, along with your main keyword. His logic is absolutely sound, and here are some figures to back it up.

Last 30 Days

Last 14 Days

Last 7 Days

From the above, you can see that despite my increased ranking for my main keyword and increase in traffic overall, the percentage of long tail keyword traffic to short tail keyword traffic has remained fairly stable. This has been achieved without any purposeful effort to target specific long tail keywords.

Traffic Estimation

The realisation that long tail keyword traffic can contribute enormously will likely give you a completely different perspective on your estimation of traffic figures. For instance, the exact keyword “modeling for kids” gets 2,400 searches per month. So the #1 website in Google should attract around 1,000 visitors. Theoretically, with a long tail to short tail percentage ratio of around 70%, I can expect my actual traffic per month to be in the region of 3,330. These estimates are based upon exact searches only and as such are extremely conservative.

My calculations are clearly rough and are yet to be proven by actual results, but it will be interesting to come back to them when the site is ranking #1 for “modeling for kids”.

Monetization

With traffic picking up, I decided to re-implement Adsense a few days ago. I will leave the ad placement as they are now until I am getting considerable traffic, at which point I will start testing different placements to see what gets the best conversion rate. I have made a few pounds in the last week or so, but nothing to write home about!

Onwards And Upwards!

For now, I am perfectly happy to continue what I am doing in terms of content creation and backlinking. As long as I am seeing positive results I will continue along this path. I hope to come back to you shortly with news of further progress!

Read The Whole Series