With the rapid growth in popularity and size of the internet it has never been more difficult to get an edge over the competition when it comes to SEO. Smaller businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the large multinationals as they simply do not have the resources or budget to throw at massive SEO campaigns and their websites can often then fall by the wayside and disappear into the gloomy depths of search engine rankings.
Long tail keywords are phrases that will have a minimum of three words and target a specific product or service, therefore minimizing the audience. At first glance this looks like a ridiculous thing to do as reducing the amount of traffic a site receives through keywords cannot be termed SEO. Hold on though as there are benefits.
If you have a small business that is good at what it does but only offers a few products or services then why would you want to be competing with the mega rich firms that offer more choice and less quality. This is where long tail keywords work better than their shorter compatriots.
Let’s say for example that you sell pink spotted minty toothpaste. You are probably one of a very small number of companies that offers such a product and competition for this particular item should be low. There are however plenty of businesses that sell minty toothpaste and pink spotted socks.
If you concentrate your website content on the shorter keyword phrases “minty toothpaste” or “pink spotted” then you are competing with all of the other sites that have variations around these themes. The chances are that no matter how much SEO you have done on the keyword phrases you will never rank that highly with search engines.
That said if you push the full long tail keyword phrase “pink spotted minty toothpaste” into your content then you ranking is sure to be higher. This is sort of true for the client as well. If they are specifically looking for pink spotted minty toothpaste they are less likely to use a short phrase in a search engine. If they do this they will have to wade through lots of products that they are not interested in before they find the correct item. Therefore they search the full long tail phrase to narrow the search results to something specific.
So although traffic to your website may be reduced the conversion rate between hits and sales should increase. Another benefit of long tail keyword SEO strategies is that it is cheaper to use a pay per click method to advertize your site, or other paid inclusion methods. This is because there is less competition between people bidding for these keyword phrases.
The downside is that if you are successful in creating good long tail keywords then they will eventually become more expensive and will experience an increase in the targeting of the big boys.
As with most things research and experimentation are the ways to make long tail keywords a successful SEO campaign strategy and it is important that you take the time to find out exactly what phrases are doing the business.
About the guest author: Peter Jackson works for one of the leading search marketing agencies in Denmark – GroupM Search.
This is an original article published on SEO Desk with exclusivity.
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Long tail keywords are used by people that are looking for something very specific. They are typically farther along in the decision process, which is why long tail keywords result in more conversions.