The Short Tale of the Long Tail Keyword - SEO Tips for Beginners

The Short Tale of the Long Tail Keyword - SEO Tips for Beginners


The key to unlocking the most profitable keywords for targeting on your website lies in understanding, exploring and then exploiting long tail keywords. The sooner you become acquainted with these traffic and money-spinning wonders, the better. This article will be particularly valuable to you if you operate in an industry where competition for top spot in Google is fierce. Ideally you want to identify and start using these long-tail keywords BEFORE you launch your site, but any online business or blog, at any stage in its lifecycle, will benefit from the information that follows. So, let's begin...

Long Tail Keywords - What are they?

Let's start with an example: Say, I'm shopping online to buy my wife some jewelry. I might begin my search by entering the following into Google: jewelry online. Almost immediately I'll be presented with a staggering 288 million results and almost immediately my head will start spinning.

And because I'm not the most patient guy in the world, I might then choose to narrow my search. I know my wife likes Mexican jewelry, so I'll add this additional snippet into the search field and hit 'enter'. Instantly, I've trimmed 260 million results from the list of candidates.

But that's still not good enough. So I try again. Lisa likes silver jewelry, so I add the color as well, like so: silver Mexican jewelry, and hey presto - I've reduced the number to just over 1 million. Sure it's still a significant number, but the results that now appear on the first page look much more useful. So finally I have the confidence to start clicking around. My search for silver Mexican jewelry begins in earnest...

So, where do long tail keywords fit in?

To understand their meaning and value we need to swap places in the above example and put ourselves in the shoes of any of the Mexican jewelry retailers who might appear on Google page 1. As the owner of one of these top ranking sites I'd be delighted to know a customer with such a clearly defined goal has discovered my website and is focused on the very product I'm selling. And if my website and wares are satisfactory, a sale is imminent; because this visitor is neither a tire-kicker nor time waster. In fact, his wallet is practically out of his pocket.

Putting it all together...

In the above scenario, here are the main players:

Short tail keyword: 'jewelry online'

Short tail keywords, by definition, are typically short in form, quite general in nature and broadly targeted thus covering a wide gamut of products or services. Consequently, they enjoy high search volume. So understandably competition for these keywords is also extremely high. This makes the job of ranking well for these prized keywords very difficult and very expensive.

Long tail keywords: 'Mexican jewelry' and 'silver Mexican jewelry'.

The latter example, Mexican silver jewelry, would be the logical choice for website owners within this industry to exploit and monetize. Unlike the short tail, this keyword has a narrow focus and is targeted towards a specific product or service - which typifies the long tail keyword. And while these keywords have obvious commercial value, they don't enjoy the same high search volume as their short tail counterparts. Which raises the question, which should we be targeting?

The answer is simple: we should target long tail keywords. And lots of them. Because collectively they can drive some serious numbers to our websites.

And because these long tail keywords have an underestimated and lower perceived value due to the lower number of searches, competition is much less intense. Which means it's much easier and much less expensive to rank well for long tail keywords and achieve that elusive yet highly sought Google number 1 spot. Put simply, long tail keywords really do have the potential to transform your site into a money-making machine.

Where can I find these long tail keywords?

Google provides a free keyword tool which is a perfect starting point. By using this tool you'll be able to identify long tail candidates and get an idea of search volume and competition for any of the jewels you discover. Your goal is to identify as many relevant, commercially viable long tail keywords as possible with adequate search volume and low competition. It sounds difficult, but it's not as hard as you might imagine.

Another option is to download any of the quality free or modestly priced keyword tools available online. Not only will they make your job easy by identifying long tail keywords at the press of a button, some will also fetch and analyse the top ten competitors in your chosen keyword category and then outline the steps you need to follow in order to knock them off their pedestal.