Longtail Keywords, What Are They And Why Are They So Freaking Important?
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
Keyword Research. In SEO it always comes down to keyword research. I feel like a broken record, but it’s really important so I keep harping on about it.
What’s the most important part of keyword research? Longtail keywords.
Most people will probably disagree with me, but I don’t care. Longtail is where the average web site owner can really reap some nearly immediate benefits from their SEO work.
First off, what are longtail keywords? I could bore you with a mathematical discussion of the statistical distribution of keywords, but I won’t. Basically longtail keywords are just keywords that don’t get searched as often as main keywords.
Here’s an example. The keyword “SEO” gets searched for around 5 millions times globally each month. That’s a main keyword.
The phrase “Link Building SEO” gets searched for around 4,400 times per month. That’s a long tail keyword.
“SEO” is the main keyword, but the phrase “Link Building SEO” contains the term “SEO” so they’re obviously related.
Get the basic idea? A longtail keyword is one that’s related to the main keyword, but gets searched for far less each month.
So why is this important? Because most sites go after main keywords and ignore longtail keywords. Why do they do that? Because there are an infinite number of long tail keywords that relate to a main keyword and a company or web site only has so much time to focus on SEO. They just can’t possibly optimize their web sites for ALL those long tail keywords.
Which gives you, the little guy, a chance to sweep in and snatch them yourself.
I can see you asking the question…if longtail keywords don’t get searched for all that often, why would I want to get my site listed under them?
Easy, because if you string enough of them together, you can generate some decent traffic. Say you get listed in the top 3 rankings for 20 longtail keywords, and each has an average of 3,000 searches per month. That’s 60,000 potential site visitors.
Is that the same as 5 million? No. Is 60,000 a nice chunk of free traffic, enough to build a solid business around? You betcha!
And why stop at 20 keywords? Why not 40, or 100? It’s just a matter of finding them and optimizing your site to get ranked well under them. Just putting in the time.
And the beauty of longtail keywords is that there’s less competition so it’s easier to get your site ranked well for them.
Myself, I use the Micro Niche Keyword Tool to find longtail keywords that don’t have much competition. The free Google Keyword tool will give you lots of longtail keywords and it will tell you the search volume for each one, but it won’t tell you which of those keywords is less competitive and hence easier to get ranked under. The Micro Niche Keyword Tool will, and that’s why I use it.
What do you think about LongTail Keywords? Comment below!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
