Growing Your Long Tail Attracts More (and Better!) Clients

It’s been awhile since I posted. Instead, for the past several months, I’ve put most of my time and my elbow grease into my new project, AgeSmart! 411 (almost ready to launch!).

That work has taught and reminded me plenty of good ideas to share with you, especially about marketing in the current digital age – good lessons for all of us.

Of course, starting a new business means a huge emphasis on marketing. To be successful, we need to be very focused on the needs and wants of the target audiences involved. Those of you who have known me for any length of time know that marketing is my “thing.” So – this part of the work has been a lot of fun for me as I’ve worked on my new project.

One vital aspect of marketing has always been making sure that search engines and now AI (both!) deliver search results that include you and your website. How this is happens has evolved over many years.

So today I’m bringing you a new search optimization focus and suggesting you review and update your website at least, and possibly your practice as a whole, based on this concept.

We’re going to focus on the “long tail.” The long tail approach has actually been in use for many years. But today it has become more important than ever in the ways it can get AI attention.

If you are an advocate with a website (which should be every single person reading this post who is already in business), then you need to know how this affects you and your work, and what might be different from the website and marketing approach you are using now.

Spending time determining what YOUR long tail should be will yield great results in the form of attracting more clients you want to serve when implemented correctly.

What’s the Long Tail?

I hope you’ve learned by now how important it is to include keywords and key phrases in any of your online presences. (There’s much more about this in The Health Advocate’s Basic Marketing Handbook.)

The concept of long tail is a recognition that using general marketing to try to attract large numbers of people makes it too easy to get lost in the crowd. If you are a restaurant that serves pizza, and you focus your keywords and phrases only on pizza, you’ll get lost in the sea of pizza shop results.

Too many results = less chance they will find YOU.

But if you get very specific in your marketing/keywords and phrases, meaning you drill down to the aspects of your work that you really enjoy and/or excel in, then the “crowd” of others who do the work will be smaller. When a potential client comes searching for you, they’ll use keywords that are very specific to their needs, and because they are so specific (the long tail = very specific descriptions) there will be fewer results.

Fewer results = a better chance they’ll find YOU!

Here’s an example:

Joe Jones just had surgery. When he received his medical bills, he knew there must be a mistake. He decides to find an advocate to help him review, and possibly negotiate the bill. So he goes online and inputs “review medical bill” in a search engine – and comes up with dozens, maybe hundreds, of possibilities. It’s overwhelming, and he has no desire to wade through them all.

So he tries again. This time his search includes more details. “Review a medical bill from XYZ hospital, knee-replacement surgery, Medicare, Betterday Advantage, negotiate to reduce bill.”

Ha! It so happens that you live and work very near XYZ Hospital and have worked with them frequently to help clients reduce their bills. You’ve also included Medicare Advantage in your keywords and phrases, the word “negotiate” and types of surgeries most frequently performed on the 65+ group. Because so many points in his search match your long tail keywords, you come up at the top of a very short list.

Who’s he gonna call? YOU!

The use of specificity reduces the number of results, but increases the number of successful searches – meaning – you’ll reach far more of the very people you want to reach.

How to Implement the Long Tail on Your Website

The long tail requires at least three steps:

Determining your very specific target audience(s).
Determining the right keywords that your very specific target audience will use to find you in the search engine.
A regular review of those keywords to determine if you’ve chosen the right ones.

There is a lot of great advice available for newbies like us who want to implement the long tail. I’m not going to try to reinvent their good advice. So for that reason, I’ve added a few links below to help you get started.

This is something you can implement yourself if you built your own site – or – you can work with your web developer to implement. Just know that YOU will need to make the lists of keywords, phrases, and the pages they represent on your site. (Don’t leave it to a tech person who is all about coding and not about marketing!)

Good luck! It’s a process. Once you’ve implemented it, it will take six weeks to a month to see results.

That said, it’s worth your efforts to grow your ability to attract the very clients you wish to work with. And they will be very happy they found you!