The long-tail effect: what and why?
Users can search with the same (or similar) search intent with different keywords. For instance, "how to make an easy chocolate cake" is a long-tailed variant of "simple chocolate cake recipe". If your website improves its ranks on the latter, it automatically improves on the long-tail keyword.
For each keyword in the forecast, SEOmonitor finds these related keywords due to the long-tail effect, calculates additional sessions they generate, and adds them to the overall forecast. This results in a more comprehensive coverage of keywords that influence the website's rankings, making the forecast algorithm more precise and the estimates more reliable.
Optimizing your website for a specific set of keywords can influence your ranking on many other keywords you did not target. This increases your targeted search volume, sometimes over ten times. Not considering this impact while calculating additional sessions might significantly underestimate the forecast estimates.
How we find the 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 a set of strongly connected unique keywords with same or similar search intent, and long-tail keywords.
Long-tail effect in Forecast
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 calculates additional sessions that the long-tail keywords would generate on reaching the same ranking target as the main keyword. You can view these keyword-wise additional sessions on the Detailed tab.
Among other variables that influence organic traffic, our Forecasting algorithm takes into account the long-tail effect, which improves our forecast algorithm's precision, giving you more reliable forecast estimates.