SEO & The Benefits of Targeting Long Tail Keywords

The start of an effective SEO campaign involves choosing the right keywords to target. These must be the keywords people are typing into search engines to find products or services like yours. Many people think that the most obvious broad phrases are the best ones for their business – this often isn’t the case for a number of reasons. Instead, careful choice of long tail keywords can often produce quicker, cheaper and more effective results.

Here we will:

• Describe what ‘broad’ and ‘long tail’ keywords actually are
• Describe some of the problems with basing your SEO strategy around broad keywords
• Show how using long tail keywords can address these problems

What Are ‘Broad’ and ‘Long Tail’ Keywords?

Broad keywords are typically short, consisting of one or two words, and usually provide a very general description of the product, service or establishment that is being promoted, for instance:

    ‘boiler installation’, ‘laptops’ or ‘golf clubs’

Long tail keywords are phrases of typically three words or more. They may be created by adding words to a broad phrase e.g.

    ‘local boiler installation’, ‘choosing a laptop’ or ‘golf clubs for men’

Or they may describe something very specific, but without including a broad phrase e.g.

    ‘install worcester combi’, ‘hp envy range’ or ‘wilson staff di7 irons’

Finding suitable long tail keywords does take a bit more time and effort, so why not just stick with simple broad phrases, especially if you are getting started with your SEO strategy?

1. Broad phrases are hard to rank for

Appearing on Google’s second or third page is almost akin to being invisible these days, as it is rare for people to go beyond the first page of results. The broader the keyword, the more pages there will be on the web which include that keyword – meaning a lot more pages for your site to compete with in the rankings.

You can get an idea of the competition for a particular keyword by performing a search and looking at the number of results that come back. To demonstrate the difference in competition between broad and long tail keywords, here are the number of search results that come back for our ‘golf club’ keywords example (actual numbers generated by searching on Google, August 2013):

Achieving a high first page ranking for ‘wilson staff di7 irons’ is clearly going to be a lot easier and cheaper than trying to fight your way past 128 million other pages to rank for ‘golf clubs’. So, unless you have a very large budget, you are wasting time and effort targeting broad phrases.

2. Broad phrases are often ambiguous

For instance, does ‘golf clubs’ mean golfing equipment or a place to go and play golf? People using this search term could be looking for either.

But long tail expressions such as ‘used golf clubs’, ‘left-handed golf clubs’, ‘wilson golf clubs’ and ‘golf sets for men’ are all clearly talking about golf equipment. They are therefore a much closer match between the interests of the searcher and the content you are ranking for – and therefore much more worth your while targeting.

3. Broad keyword searches are often followed up with longer tail searches

Broad phrase searches often bring up irrelevant or wide-ranging results. If people can’t instantly see what they want, they will usually do another search using a more specific phrase – in other words, they will move to using long tail keywords which, if you have targeted in your SEO strategy, you can benefit from.

4. Broad phrases are used for researching, not buying

If a person is searching for ‘wooden furniture’ as an example, they are not ready to buy yet. They are browsing for inspiration and are very unlikely to purchase.

If they are searching for ‘wooden bedroom furniture’, they are a warmer prospect, as at least they have a more specific requirement in mind.

If they are searching for ‘dark wood teak beds’ they have narrowed their search down to a particular type of furniture, the colour and the wood they are looking for. At this point they likely are ready to buy.

5. Broad keywords have high search volume but low targeting

It is easy to be blinded by the large search volumes associated with broad keywords – a broad keyword with 50,000 searches can look a lot more tempting than a long tail keyword with perhaps 1,000 searches.

Focusing on the lower search volumes may at first feel like you are losing the potential for 50,000 customers. But as we’ve noted already, long tail keywords bring in much more targeted traffic, which is then more likely to result in a click-through to your site and then to a sale or enquiry.

Put simply, would you rather spend your efforts targeting the 1,000 people who have shown specific interest in your type of product or service, or the 50,000 people who are either searching for something completely different or are just having a look around?

How to Use Long Tail Keywords in Your SEO Strategy

• Brainstorm with your team to come up with a list of three or four-word terms related to your product or service
• Look through your existing literature, web pages and catalogues for examples of terms that you already use to describe your product or service
• Use a keyword tool such as Wordtracker or the free Google keyword tool (note this will soon only be accessible to advertisers) to see how many searches each gets and how competitive they are. Then pick a varied selection of these to work with – perhaps in the region of around 30 to start with
• If you are using Google Adwords, you can also see which long tail phrases perform best in terms of bringing in traffic and generating conversions
• Once you have selected a list, write them into your web copy, using as many related terms as possible to build a theme
• Write them into blog and social media posts to further strengthen your brand association with these phrases
• Over time, build more unique content with other long tail variants to further increase traffic

Let iMarketing find your long tail keywords for you. We offer a range of SEO services, including keyword research and identification of long tail keywords, as well as copywriting around your chosen keywords.

Click here for more information on our search engine optimisation service.