What is a “long tail” keyword? Basically, long tail keywords are longer phrases that are typed into search engines by people looking for specific products or services. For instance, a person may start searching on a short tail term like “Hawaii Vacation” but then become overwhelmed with the results. That person will then modify the search one or more times until the final result is “Hawaii Honeymoon Vacation with Luau.” At this point in the searcher’s quest, the results that show up are more likely to be specific to the query, and the person is more likely to make a purchase.
E-Commerce, Lead-Generation, and even informational sites like long-tail traffic because it converts at a higher rate. This is because short-tail terms can be too vague, or represent a mixture of multiple demographics.
The conversion rate on long-tail keywords can be many times higher than that for less specific phrases. However, the downside of long-tail keywords is that they don’t have a very high search volume, despite their profitability. They may also be “one of a kind” phrases that only hit your site once. If you monitor your keyword traffic, you may even see that you have a long list of very good keywords that only got you one visit. Instead of optimizing your site for a lot of individual phrases (which would be counterproductive) a better strategy is to make your site more long-tail friendly.
How do you get long tail traffic, without optimizing every possible keyword? The solution rests in creating content and links that cover all the main elements of customer interest. Using the “Hawaii Vacation” example, you would be best served creating a site with plenty of content about specific offerings like honeymoon vacations, luau listings, and other points of interests. Simultaneously, you would be getting links to your site pages that reference the most common elements of each search. You might have one inbound link that says “Hawaii honeymoon vacation” while another one says “Hawaii Luau.” Naturally, you don’t want to overload your links with every possible keyword variation, but you definitely want to make sure that your content pages are at least mentioning the most common topics that would make up a long-tail search.
How do you find long-tail terms? One way is to use the Google Keyword Tool . Start by typing in a few short-tail phrases and see the results you get. Normally there is a list of specific matches and a list of relevant phrases. You can sort these by search volume. If you have a tracking program like Google Analytics installed, you can look at your keyword traffic to see what people are typing in when they get to your site. This information is most useful when you note the words that are most common to the majority of your traffic. Conversely, you can look at this list to see what words are not part of the mix, and then go after those words with more SEO, link building, and content creation. If you have conversion or goal tracking installed, you can even see which terms are getting the best conversions, so you can work off the terms most likely to deliver results and not just traffic.
If you want to implement a long-tail SEO strategy, you definitely have your work cut out for you, but there are some shortcuts. For starters, having a blog lets you talk about all the different offerings you have at your business, and each blog entry functions as a new page added to your site. As a general rule, you can get lots of long-tail traffic by talking about your company, your services, and even your contribution to the community. In many cases you can start to see good long-tail traffic that you hadn’t previously been soliciting, and you can use this knowledge to build more “static” page on your site that develop this information. If you’re building a new site, long-tail traffic is almost always going to be the first traffic you see, so having good content built into your website is essential. Over the long haul, making periodic updates to your website will give you more chances to capture new traffic.
Finally, improving your short-tail traffic will pull up long-tail terms at the same time. This is because the long-tail terms you are looking for have one or more “root phrases” that are based around more popular keywords. By having plenty of relevant content, you have a better chance of snagging more of the specific multi-word queries that people are always typing in, and your site should see a better conversion rate via the aggregate of bigger phrases and their specific interests. While it is never possible to have a site that is “all things to all people” (unless you are Wikipedia, which is a charity), you can still scoop up a lot of profitable traffic by understanding the vast marketplace of low-volume keyword searches.
