Talk about targeted traffic and conversions - that’s the answer to the question in the post title.
Keyword research forms a major part of blog post SEO - and long tail keywords form yet another important part of SEO.
I know SEO scares most bloggers but that’s something you really can’t avoid. SEO is not about just pleasing the search engines or about merely finding ways to ranking higher, but it is also about (in fact, more importantly about) making people happy!
What does keyword research have to do with SEO and pleasing people?
Keywords are nothing but key phrases or search terms that people type into the search box in order to find out what they want. Keyword research helps you find keywords that are
(ii) less competitive (meaning, you can easily rank for that keyword without having to lose your leg and arm).
What are long tail keywords?
Long tail keywords are keywords or search phrases that usually contain more than 3 words. They get very close to what is actually searched by an average user.
Take yourself as an example. Let’s say you are looking to buy a digital camera. What would you type in the search box?
Let me give you a few examples:
buy Sony digital camera
where to buy cheap digital cameras
best Nikon digital camera for sale
buy digital camera on emi
features of a good digital camera
how to buy digital camera online
I’m sure you wouldn’t be searching for “digital camera”; rather you would be typing in one or more of the other examples I’ve given above depending upon your interests, your needs and your budget.
And long tail keywords are not called so just because they are long (comprising of 3 or more words) - although that is a sweet coincidence. Rather, they are called so because of the… well allow me to illustrate with this graphic from Moz.com
You get it? If we plot the number of keywords against the number of searches for the corresponding keywords what keywords cover the tail part of the graph are the long tail keywords - and hence the name.
Why should you incorporate long tail keywords in SEO?
The head keywords are more generic and short ones and they get tons of searches each month. But at the same time, those keywords are the ones that are extremely hard to rank for coz the big heads are already ranking for those “common” or “generic” keywords.
Needless to say, the big companies invest a lot of money in making their sites rank for those extremely highly competitive keywords. This is something that the small business owners like you and me can’t afford to do.
But rather, what we can (and should) do is to make use of the long tail keywords - there are lots of them, in fact tons of them, so you don’t have to worry about getting drained.
The only downside (it’s NOT a downside actually, but most bloggers think so) is that the long tail keywords get a very lesser number of searches compared to the head keywords.
However, combining a handful of long tail keywords and given the fact that you can relatively easily rank for those compared to the head keywords, your ROI is certainly great.
Instead of writing posts based on generic keywords and losing your leg and arm trying to rank for it, you can write posts for a handful of long tail keywords, easily rank for them, get targeted traffic, get super good conversions and live happily ever after.
Here are more (precise) advantages of using long tail keywords
Long tail keywords guarantee much easier search engine ranking
This could sound controversial right? A long tail keyword has much lesser search volume compared to a generic keyword.
For instance, the keyword “email marketing” has a search volume of 74000 whereas the long tail keyword “permission based email marketing” has a search volume of only 260.
But that is not the point - let’s look at another metric! The number of results that are returned for a particular keyword.
“email marketing” has 356,000,000 results whereas “permission based email marketing” has only 36,000,000 results - that’s much lesser competition, right?
Most people think that long tail keywords have very less search volume and hence they tend to write blog posts based on keywords that have a big search volume.
But those keywords are not necessarily easy to rank for.
You get targeted traffic with long tail keywords
As I mentioned earlier long tail keywords are mostly the ones that people type in to search box exactly. If you rank higher in search engines for a particular long tail keyword, and if you have really written the post exclusively on that topic, you are going to make the visitor happy.
The cool by product here is that you exactly delivered what the visitor was looking for (I’m assuming your content is really useful). This makes both people and search engines happy.
Not just that, the fact that you are ranking for a good collection of keywords that people are exactly typing into the search box means you are going to invite highly targeted traffic.
Long tail keywords boost conversions
This is a direct by-product of getting targeted traffic. When your visitors get what they want, and when they are happy, they are more likely to take action.
You don’t have to go for any special strategy or a technique to boost conversions of your blog posts - by targeting long tail keywords you automatically (I’d say, even unknowingly, in some cases) get targeted traffic that converts!
You don’t have to feel guilty about black hat SEO …. BUT…
Optimizing your blog posts for long tail keywords doesn’t involve any black hat techniques and you need not be feeling guilty about it.
With long tail keywords you can simply write a whole post based on one keyword - and there is nothing fishy about it. The only thing is that you need to be very careful not to over optimize your post.
In fact, over optimizing a post for a long tail keyword is quite hard since you cannot keep on repeating a long tail keyword throughout the post as you would do for a generic keyword. You can derive lots of long tail variations of a generic keyword and using those derived keywords will ensure that you naturally include a reasonable volume of the generic keyword.
But if you try to artificially repeat or dump a long tail keyword into your blog post, you will make your post read gibberish. You won’t please either the search engines or the readers. There’s this risk in writing a blog post based on long tail keywords.
Instead of trying to optimize the post for a long tail keyword by simply dumping the same keyword into the post, you should naturally include the related keywords into your post.
Well, “include” is not the right word - you should actually expand your post based on related keywords. You should not force the keywords into the post; rather you should make the post useful by expanding it based on additional keywords (additional information).
This way your post will read natural. Not just that, but you will also be able to expand the post in different directions (since related keywords are nice expansion of a see idea) - your post will be more complete and more useful this way.
Long tail keywords: Takeaway
I’d say every blogger should absolutely go for them. Long tail keywords make it easy for every blogger to rank for the really useful and precise keywords that their audience are looking for.
By creating good quality content based on the long tail keywords, you can make both the people and search engines and yourself happy.
Let me know your thoughts. Do you go for long tail keywords? Do you care to find them and write posts based on them?
In a future post, I’ll talk about how to effectively find long tail keywords.
Hi Jane,
Totally agree with all that you’ve written, and yes, I do use long tail keywords for my post too. However, not all of them rank that well even if they are the low competition ones, while sometimes even the ones you don’t really arget rank! I wonder how does that happen?
I’ve even tried writing posts without any keywords, or without hunting actually for any keywords, and surprisingly those worked! It does confuse me a little as to what really works and what doesn’t in such cases. I’d love it if someday you could show us some real authentic way of using Google Adwords in such a way that our posts rank as one hears and sees so many versions of the same, though each one says something different, unless of course there is another better way.
Thanks for sharing. Have a nice week ahead
Jane, Is there any way to retrieve/download all these long tail keyword searches from Google using the keyword tool.
Long tail pro is great for long tail keyword research Praveen. Here’s my review of Long Tail Pro > http://www.probloggingsuccess.com/long-tail-pro-video-review/
Well written post and i can say you are right in most of your point, i always see a positive result when ever i research a keyword before writing my post but there is one strange thing, Google has their own way of doing things, you may find a long tail keyword and optimize it but still you will still be no where to be found on Google, what (Harleena Singh) is the truth, sometimes the least expected articles is the one that will surprise you in terms of traffic and conversations etc
Jane, I love using the long tail keywords vs the most popular ones. Much easier to get results quicker. I used the Longtail Keyword Pro tool for a test drive and it was quite good! I also like checkin the keyword tool in Google too. If I see high competition I try to stay away from those keywords. Thanks for your tips Jane and have a nice day.
I am really looking forward to a post on how to find long tail keywords. This post did a great job of explaining the concept. I wonder how often bloggers unknowingly or unintentionally write a blog post that is optimized for a long tail keyword. Some of these keywords are very organic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if bloggers use them without knowing it.
Perhaps the best way to optimize a blog post for a long tail keyword is to simply use the keyword as your post’s title. You can change some of the so-called “stop words” (i.e. the, is, a, etc.) but the closer to the exact phrase you use in the title, the better your post will rank in the search engines.
There are so many inside terms in SEO, search etc that you must be very into it to understand it, ive learned quite a bit with this post, thanks.
Long tail Keywords are always helpful to increase the number of unique visitors or for your exact service/product. It’s not more helpful if you want to make a Brand. I like the way you added such good thought that we always think about happiness and satisfaction of people not always important higher rankings.
On-page optimization for long-tail keywords can result in ranking more than a page higher in search results, compared to half a page optimizing with head terms, according to a study by New York-based SEO & SaaS company Conductor . They also found that long-tail keywords converted 2.5 times better than head terms.
Hi, I really liked your point where you’ve written that SEO is not just about making search engine happy but also making people happy…completely agree with it cuz a great content is ultimately what readers want ! This article truly deserves an applaud as it explains how important these long tail keywords are. Thanks for sharing !
Hey,
Was reading somewhere they said no keyword game is over with SEO, after that reading I start thinking how is it possible cos when every some one like to search something they need keywords for sure. Now about this post well long tail keywords are always better for PPC as they are less expensive.
If we think about users than we must think like how we search something on internet and how long we can write for getting exact thing we want.
According to the Optimization point of view we are long tail keywords are easy to rank.
Hello Jane Sheeba,
Being a new blogger I was facing difficulties to know the basics of the keywords, but finally after reading your post, I am much familiar with the concept of keywords. Thanks for sharing
Hai Jane,
Really great and useful article. To collect Longtail keywords, Longtail pro is very good option. I have learn few simple points on Long tail keywords. Thank you for this share.