Chasing My Long Tail – My Truth About SEO

by Kris Berg

Realtor, Associate Broker

Author website

I found myself this morning checking out our blog traffic stats. I don’t know why I do this exactly – It’s idle curiosity, I suppose. I’ll know when my blog hits the big time. That will be the day when I am so busy meeting with clients and closing escrows that I won’t have time to visit our site’s back end.

We blog for sport, we blog for exposure, but mostly we blog for business. There – I said it. Anyone who says otherwise is not being honest. Oh, sure, it has become an addiction, and I sincerely believe that if I retired from my day job today, I would still be blogging tomorrow. It can have that kind of hold on you.

In the meantime, blogging needs to either be a hobby or a component of my business plan. As of press time, it is a little of both. Speaking to the business side of things, my Google-ability is generally of very little concern to me. “Blasphemy!” you say. Let me explain.

Unless the person stumbling on to my site through a search bar is looking to buy or sell a home in San Diego, they are of no value to me from a business perspective. Further, I am most interested in the person who is looking to buy or sell a home in San Diego and who actually lives in San Diego. Sure, there is the potential to attract the eyes and business of people relocating from Duluth, but relocation business is time intensive, needle-in-the-haystack work. We welcome the work, but it is a lower percentage play, much more difficult to cultivate and convert. So if you agree that the local audience is the audience for which you perform, why give a fig about SEO?

Everyone give a warm welcome to Panama!

Jay Thompson through one of his posts turned me on to Who’s Amung Us. They have a nifty little map widget that allows you to display current and past visitors to your site and their location. Here is what my visitor map for the San Diego Home Blog looks like:

(Note: The previously posted real-time map has now been replaced by a screen shot to account for the fact that the author is stupid. By embedding my map here and at my home blog, I was showing all of the Bloodhound’s traffic too. While this made me look much more influential back in San Diego, it really wasn’t fair. Alert husband knew that something was amiss when 20 stars were blinking back at him. With a readership of three, this is statistically not possible.)

This is a scary little feature, scary because I live in constant fear that my map will display only one visitor – me.  Yet, I find it has value. The value to me is that it serves as a constant reminder that people actually read my drivel posts. A few days without adding fresh content and a half-dozen blinking lights reminds me that I had better get typing. Beyond this, it is a sobering visual which suggests that the business versus hobby scale of my blogging may be leaning in the wrong direction if solvency is my goal.

The widget continuously updates, so you will have to take my word for it when I tell you that at 6:00 AM this morning I was delighted to find that Panama was in the room. This led me to my back end stats counter in search of The Truth (why in the heck is Panama on my blog?). Here is just a smattering of my most recent 100 visitors and the corresponding keywords that snagged their attention:

Panama – “Days left in summer” (None, by the way.)

Italy – “Saldana and Afghani” (Huh?)

Long Beach, California and Ankara, Turkey – “Girls volleyball” (Laurie? Is that you?)

Hayden, Alabama – “Houses rolled with toilet paper” (Sicko.)

Allendale, Michigan – “Too much fiber one” (Sorry – I’ll try to sweeten things.)

United States – “San Diego boat junk yard” (I’m not sure about the boat-thing, but I will generally give you that one.)

Los Angeles, California (CBS) – Leslie Appleton-Young (Uh-oh. I smell trouble Leslie Stahl.)

So, for the long-tail searches involving toilet paper, the changing of the seasons, a healthy diet, high school athletics and “Saldana and Afghani” (which, by the way, for some unknown reason led to an image I had posted of Spam on a plate), I rock. Obviously, the keywords I care about most, such as “San Diego Real Estate”, are nearly impossible to crack. And, ironically, I have unthinkingly typed the less popular term “Scripps Ranch” into articles so many times that I have given up on manicures, yet you won’t find me through Google that way unless you follow it with “blog”, “floor plans” or “toilet paper”.

Does this mean that blogging is for naught? Not. We get results, and we can point to many transactions which came as a direct or indirect result of blogging, but they were not related to searchability. Our success has been related to local promotion of the site as a complement to our other marketing undertakings. The visitors I care most about are the ones who intentionally find me by typing in the URL. They are the ones who I speak to and who are more inclined to return, stay, and ultimately hire me.

My detractors will say I am short-sighted and even flat-out wrong, but I think it is an enormous mistake to spend any measurable amount of time worrying about keywords and SEO. If you write frequently, if you write on topic, and if you write with style and passion, the visitors will follow. Over time, I suspect I just might find what I am not looking for, that elusive Google-ability. Until then, being overly concerned about SEO would just be chasing my, albeit long, tail.