No the keyword “alligator” would not qualify… unless of course you sold alligators. Even then that single word is not what I am referring to. “alligator shoes” is better, but not quite the long tail I was looking for. How about “alligator shoes for women”? Now we’re heading in the right direction…
Long Tail Keywords are search phrases that combine 3 or more words. They will get fewer clicks, but they are typically less competitive (facilitating higher page positioning) and more targeted, resulting in a higher conversion rate. Let’s take something that I am a little more familiar with: “website marketing”. If you were to search on that single keyword you wouldn’t be alone. That word does get a lot of hits, but not everyone with the word “website” on their website has anything to do with website marketing. Your search results would turn up websites that promote:
- Website Design
- Website Hosting
- Website portfolios
- Nothing to do with anything
- Etc.
“website marketing” is better, but still awful competitive, and not nearly as targeted as it can be. Although my staff and I work with companies all over the Country, people have a tendency to geotarget their searches. Therefore “website marketing ireland” would be more appropriate for me. There would be fewer searches, but the quality of those searches would be much better. “website marketing company cork ireland” is about as long-tailed as you want to get. The number of search results that I am competing with goes down from about 192 million for “website marketing” to less than a few hundred, AND I can be assured that whoever is doing the searching is targeting someone in my area for a reason. There are 3 things that I want you to take away from this article:
- For every word that you add to your keyword phrase, there will be fewer searches conducted.
- For every word that you add to your keyword phrase, there will be fewer competitors in the search results.
- For every word that you add to your keyword phrase, there is one more opportunity to target your service or location.
At the end of the day, I would rather have 5% of the limited searches than 0% of the traffic from 192 million searches.
