Inbound Marketing & Technology | Martech | Blog

Why do long tail keywords deserve more attention?

Written by Thirumalesh Prasad C G | September 26, 2017

I have a friend that owns a jewelry store. There are a lot of jewelry which is not only exceptionally beautiful and of excellent quality, but that are also hand-made. My friend has the ambition to take on the jewelry industry globally.

However, we all know that the jewelry industry is saturated. To even further worsen the situation is the existence of jewelry giants such as Tiffany & Co. who have taken the online competition to a whole new level. There are a lot of starts up the business that has the ambition to dominate the world but have a sentence by the giants of their industry.

It is challenging for small businesses to have their share of the cake in the global search engines ranking for the highly competitive and generic words such as jewelry, earrings, gold rings, etc. This, however, makes long tail keywords the escape route for small businesses and even bigger ones trying to capture more audience. This is one of the best ways for businesses to get a decent amount of organic traffic with the high conversion rate to their website. Before we go any further, let us take a look at what long tail keywords are.

What do we mean by “Long Tail Keywords”?

Long tail keywords directly refer to the art of making use of target queries that includes more than three words. The longer your keyword, the easier it will be for you to rank high in the search engines.

It is true that these keywords usually have a much lower search volume which is evident in the less traffic they draw and results in more inferior competition. However, the little traffic is much more valuable and focused than using a single keyword. What is the point in getting thousands of traffic that results in less than ten sales when you can get hundreds of traffic that will result in almost 50% sales!? The reason for the valuable traffic is because people who usually search for long tail keywords are more interested in what you have to offer and much more likely to buy what you have for sale. This shows the importance of long tail keywords in boosting your revenues when you use them the right way.

It is true that these keywords usually have a much lower search volume which is evident in the less traffic they draw and results in more inferior competition. However, the little traffic is much more valuable and focused than using a single keyword. What is the point in getting thousands of traffic that results in less than ten sales when you can get hundreds of traffic that will result in almost 50% sales!? The reason for the valuable traffic is because people who usually search for long tail keywords are more interested in what you have to offer and much more likely to buy what you have for sale. This shows the importance of long tail keywords in boosting your revenues when you use them the right way.

This brings about a reduction in the probability of converting this traffic. However, if a prospect searches for “an android phone running android nougat with a 4-inch screen” and this matches your long tail keyword, then there is a higher possibility of you converting this user to a customer.

Ever heard of the “Search Demand Curve”?

The search demand curve is a chart that was introduced by the Webmag. They carried out an analysis of the various SEO options, and it was observed that there was a 250% increase when a long tail keyword was used compared to the utilization of a single keyword. This study further confirms the speculations about long tail keywords performing the magic.

Now that we are familiar with the importance of long tail keywords how do we make use of these keywords to our advantage?

Targeting long tail keywords

Making use of the long tail SEO strategy can be a bit demanding and it is of high importance to note that the approach to use it matters a lot. Get started by making adequate research on the long tail keywords that are most relevant to your business that you can bank on.

To ensure that the research is properly done, make use of your seed keywords. Head over to Adwords Keyword Planner and click on the “Search for new keywords” and then input your head phrase by performing the research for every expression individually. Make use of phrases that are much more accurate and also in high demand as well.

The next step will be to create new contents that will be enriched in all of your newly discovered long tail phrases, and make sure that enough justice is done to the phrases in your contents. An additional tip is to avoid throwing all your keywords in just one article. A few topics for every keyword will do. Once this is complete, you are ready to start reaping the fruits of long tail keywords.

Asides the Adwords keyword planner, there are some other tools that you will find useful in your research for the perfect long tail phrases. Some of them are as follows:

  • Ubersuggest.org: This research tool generates hundreds to thousands of keyword variations on a single click.
  • KeywordTool.io: This works similar to Ubersuggest and generates keyword variations based on the broad phrase you input.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s been almost a decade since long tail keywords came into the picture and became popular as an SEO strategy. However, a lot of internet marketers have been too distracted by other techniques that are available to improve the SEO performance of their website leaving out the long tail keywords which are a real gold mine. Over the years, long tail keywords have proven itself to be an effective way of increasing site rankings and surely deserves a place in your SEO options.