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Long Tail Keywords

Keyword research, and implementing the resulting keywords, is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Within keyword research, however, is another important piece: long tail keywords. Comprised of a basic or root keyword with variants and modifiers, the long tail keyword continually becomes an essential part of keyword research—and SEO in general. These long tail keywords are often easier to rank for and can pertain specifically to your business and industry. In utilizing this type of keyword, you’ll increase your chances of ranking for specific terms and ultimately drive more traffic to your website.

Considering the importance of using long tail keywords across your website, it’s essential you implement long tail keywords as you delve into keyword research for your website. Once you do, you can then monitor the resulting traffic with StatCounter to see where your traffic is coming from and how those users interact on your site. Before you get started, though, let’s take a closer look at long tail keywords.

Suggested Reading

If you’re familiar with long tail keywords and would like to learn more about SEO, you can view the articles we’ve provided below:

Why Long-Tail Keywords?

We can imagine many wonder why it makes more sense to target long tail keywords as opposed to more broad, all-encompassing search terms. The fact is, these broad search terms are not only highly competitive, but they don’t always pertain to one or a select few disciplines. Plus, you’d be surprised to hear how little these types of words account for in regards to overall web searches. In fact, it’s estimated these broad search terms only account for about 30% of all web searches. In contrast, long tail keywords account for the remaining 70% of search queries. To put things in perspective, take a look at the table comparing long tail and your average keywords below:

KeywordLong Tail Variant
Men's ShoesMen's leather dress shoes
Flower ShopFlower Shop in Seattle, WA
SEOSEO Consulting Services
GlassesDiscount Ray-Ban Glasses
Laptop CaseCheap Apple Laptop Cases

As we’ve alluded to, traffic resulting from long tail keywords is also more meaningful. The aforementioned broad search terms, such as “men’s shoes” can vary in search intent. Some users may be looking for men’s leather dress shoes, while others would like to find men’s athletic sneakers. So, even if your site ranks for such a broad term, users may quickly find you don’t offer exactly what they need and look for such elsewhere.

This is rarely the case with long tail keywords. Because they often consist of more specific search terms, they’ll closely match the user’s search intent. Therefore, the site visitors from these search queries will be more interested in your content, resulting in better traffic and increased conversion rates. So, how can you research long tail keywords?

Finding Long Tail Keywords

In essence, you can go about finding long tail keywords as you would with regular keyword research. Of course, you’ll want to start off by brainstorming a range of keywords you know pertain directly to your business and industry. From here, consider what kind of variants your typical customer or client might search.

Once you have some keywords in mind, based off your own intuition and knowledge of your industry, you can simply type these keywords into Google to see what kind of content ranks for each keyword. Plus, you can use the suggested searches at the bottom of the search results page to find relevant keywords web users search for. Additionally, you should utilize a keyword research tool to find related keywords, new keywords, and the feasibility of those terms for your website. Let’s lay these steps out for better understanding:

  1. Type any keyword you’d like to rank for in Google.
  2. Take a look at the provided results to ensure this keyword is relevant to your business and site content.
  3. Scroll down to the bottom to find the aforementioned related searches. Repeat the previous steps for any relevant searches you find applicable.
  4. Now, you can both check the keywords you’ve found and find more keywords with a keyword research tool, such as SEMRush.
  5. With the tool, check the difficulty and search volume for each of your keywords to ensure they’re worth targeting.
  6. Put them to use! Create compelling content and add long tail keywords to title tags and headers in pages to get started, among other on-page optimization tactics.

For further information on keywords, keyword research, and more, be sure to check out some of our other Insights pages.

 

Summary

In short, long tail keywords drive more meaningful traffic to site, and they’re often far more feasible to rank for in search results pages. Of course, you should still ensure the search volume (how many times the term is searched per month) for the keywords you target isn’t too low. For instance, a keyword with just 10 searches a month won’t bring in a great amount of traffic, though you will rank more easily for such a term. Regardless, be sure to include long tail keywords in your targeted terms.

Track Your Efforts

Once you’ve targeted a number of long tail keywords and have begun to implement them in your SEO strategy, you may need to rely on a tool to monitor your rankings for each keyword. However, you can also monitor your site’s traffic, as well as other metrics, with StatCounter’s free web tracker. This way, you can keep a close eye on your web traffic and how users are interacting on site to ensure your strategies are performing well.

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