The long-tail effect
There can be several variations of a main keyword with the same or similar search intent (for instance, "how to make easy chocolate cake" is a variation of "simple chocolate cake recipe"). If your website improves in rankings for the main keywords, it also improves on the closely related keywords with the same or similar search intent and long-tail keywords.
When optimizing your website for a specific set of keywords, many other keywords that weren't targeted are also influenced. This increases your targeted search volume, sometimes over ten times. Not considering this impact while calculating additional sessions might significantly underestimate the forecast estimates.
To address this, we find closely related and long-tail keywords using our topic aggregation technology and include them in the list of keywords for your forecast. This results in a longer list of unique keywords that would be influenced once the website improves in rankings on the main keyword list, making the forecast algorithm more precise and the estimates more reliable.
How we find closely related and long-tail keywords
We rely on our topic aggregation technology, powered by our curated keyword database, to find long-tail keywords, and related keywords with the same or similar search intent.
For each main keyword, we perform the following steps to find them:
Find all the top-ranking landing pages for that keyword.
Find all the keywords that the pages rank for.
Discover the semantic field by finding common keywords among two or more landing pages. The more pages the keywords appear on, the stronger the connection with the main keyword.
List these keywords according to the strength of their connection with the main keyword.
For every main keyword, this gives us the list of strongly connected unique keywords with the same or similar search intent, and long-tail keywords.
Long-tail effect in our Forecast algorithm
Our Forecast algorithm considers the long-tail effect while calculating additional sessions generated from achieving an SEO goal.
For each keyword you include in the forecast from the Rank Tracker, our algorithm finds closely related and long-tail keywords and adds them to the list of keywords with the same ranking goal as the main keyword. We then calculate additional sessions for these keywords too, and add them to the result.
Among other variables that influence organic traffic, we take into account the long-tail effect, which improves our forecast algorithm's precision, giving you more reliable forecast estimates.