The importance of long tail keywords

If you build and manage websites then it is likely that you will be seeing traffic to those sites that comes from ‘long tail’ keywords. By specifically targeting these long tail keywords you can dramatically increase the traffic that comes to your website, target more specific traffic and potentially increase profits for your sites. Targeting long tail keywords can be a very effective strategy for bringing visitors to your site.

Long Tail Keywords

Typing a word or phrase into a search engine is what most people will do when they want to find information about a product, service or just information in general!

Short tail keywords usually contain one to two words and describe a niche or market. Long tail keywords on the other hand usually contain three or more words and describe a more narrow section of a market and therefore are said to be more ‘targeted’. Building a website that is targeted toward the right visitors will increase chances of getting in front of the audience that you want, so using long tail keywords in your site structure, such as in the page titles, as well as in the content can be helpful as this will assist people and search engines to find your site and associate your site with the keyword phrase that you wish to target. Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate the concept.

If we take an example of a short tail keyword phrase, such as ‘lawyers’ or even ‘medical lawyers’. Some long tail variations on this might be ‘medical malpractice lawyers’ or ‘medical malpractice lawyers Chicago’. You can see that the long tail keywords narrow the focus of the keywords and target a more precise sub-niche. Let’s look at a couple more examples:

Electronic goods. This phrase is extremely broad and could include a wide range of things. 42″ LCD TV on the other hand is much more specific and is an example of a long tail keyword.

Why is finding long tail keywords helpful?

Finding the right long tail keywords is very handy. Targeting a good set of long tail keywords will first send more traffic to your site. Of course, traffic is extremely important to the success of a website. It is often far easier to rank well for long tail keywords as they have less competition and so targeting the long tail can be a strategy that really pays off. The other main benefit of long tail keywords is that they tend to attract buyers that are more likely to convert as the specificity of the topic is far more than when a broad keyword phrase is used.

Often a website owner will speak about their topic at a level that is probably too broad and try to target a very wide audience. Targeting the short tail means generally high competition and also less conversion of buyers given that you may not be meeting the specific needs of that buy. So for example, targeting the keyword phrase ‘party supplies’ may seem like a great idea if you own a balloon shop, however, you may be likely to get a lot of visitors who were looking for things other than balloons so your conversion may not be as high as if you had focused on ‘helium party balloons’.

How Can You Find Long Tail Keywords?

Using software or websites, like the Google Adwords keyword tool is the way to go about finding long tail keywords. These sorts of applications or websites allow users to input a ‘seed’ keyword and then generate a list of keywords that may be associated with that keyword.

Although there are many proprietary keyword research applications available offering a range of features and functions and for a range of prices. One that I use and can recommend is Long Tail Pro. It’s been developed to work quickly and effectively to find the long tail keywords that show good promise in relation to traffic, commerciality and competitiveness.

Take a look at moreLong Tail Pro Reviews to learn more about Long Tail Pro and finding long tail keywords keywords.