What are Long Tail Keywords and how can you use them for your SEO?

If you have been looking for information on SEO and SEO companies, you may have come across the term ‘Long Tail Keywords’ and wondered what it meant. Well, long-tail is nothing to do with furry animals but is in fact, an SEO technique that, if used correctly, can help to generate increased traffic to websites and other online properties.

At the core of long-tail SEO are Long Tail Keywords, which are keywords that contain more than two words. You won’t be surprised to know that keywords with only one or two words are called short-tail keywords. Examples of short-tail keywords in the dog niche would be ‘kennel’ and ‘dog grooming’, and in the technology niche, ‘laptop’ and ‘computer keyboard’.

If a website owner were to try and rank for any of those keywords, they would be competing against tens of thousands of other websites, and many of them will be websites owned by some of the biggest online companies in the world. It is safe to say that most local marketing budgets are not going to be able to compete with the likes of companies whose SEO budget is almost unlimited.

So, how can you compete online and get traffic to your website? Well, the answer is long-tail SEO, and employing any number of Long Tail Keywords that you can rank for. A key point to note is that your competition online isn’t the Amazon of this world, it is the websites owned by other companies operating in your niche or market, and who do so within your local area.

With that in mind, we need an SEO strategy that enables your website to outrank your competition when certain searches are entered in Google. This is where one of the most important aspects of Long Tail Keywords takes place, and that is keyword research. This research establishes what long-tail keywords are applicable to your business and which ones have enough searches to make them candidates for optimising your content and other SEO factors on your website. Talk to us today

To explore keyword research further let’s take a plumbing business that is based in Perth. If it tried to compete for ‘plumber Perth’, or ‘plumbing Perth’, those are short-tail keywords and will likely have every other plumbing-based business competing to rank for them. To rank for them might be possible, but it would require a lot of resources, and plenty of time, and in the meantime traffic from easier to rank for keywords is going elsewhere.

If, instead, we turn our SEO research to Long Tail Keywords, here are some options we could try, and notice how we add small conjunctions like ‘in’, and descriptive words, ’24 hour’ or ’emergency’, to add further variations such as;

Add points of the compass: plumber northeast Perth
Use specific areas in Perth: plumber in Rockingham
Descriptive words: ’24 hour plumber’ and with the location, ’24 hour plumber in Rockingham
Specialist plumbers: ’24 hour drainage plumber’, ’emergency drainage plumber in Rockingham’

By applying these principles and using a search term like ’emergency drainage plumber in Rockingham’, a business that did specialise in drainage plumbing, had an emergency call-out service, and covered the Rockingham area, could be ranked at the top of Google relatively quickly.

Having done the keyword research, optimised the website for those keywords, we now come to another advantage of long-tail SEO, and that is increased conversions. Think about the person who has typed in ’emergency drainage plumber in Rockingham’.

Are they casually browsing, or is it a safe bet that they need a plumber quickly? If they find a local plumbing business’s website at the top of the search results, they are not likely to spend the next hour checking out the others. They are going to pick up the phone and employ that plumber’s services there and then. This is the power of a professional SEO company.

So, Long Tail Keywords / SEO allows small and local businesses to compete on a more even playing field on Google, improves website traffic, and it can bring visitors to a website who are closer to the point of buying.

The internet has billions of web pages, and many of them are competing to be noticed by Google in order to move up the search rankings for that coveted page one of results. There are lots of SEO tactics and strategies that will help achieve this, and one of the most important is optimizing the page for the keywords you want to rank for. Here are some very simple ways to ensure that any, and all web pages on your website have the best chance of improving their ranking with the use of keywords.

Researching Keywords
The mystique surrounding keywords, and how best to optimize for them has led to countless theories and complicated strategies about how it should be done. In reality, optimizing a page for keywords is not that difficult, and only requires some very straightforward actions.

Keywords for SEO
The first of these is to do proper keyword research to establish which keywords and keyword phrases you need to target to be able to challenge those sites which currently occupy the first page of results within your niche. There are numerous keyword research tools available, with the most obvious one being the free AdWords keyword tool that Google offers.

If you really want to dig deep, to the extent that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting, how highly they rank for those keywords, and where they are getting backlinks from, paid tools such as Ahrefs can give you all that information. It cannot be stressed enough how important this sort of keyword research is. It can mean the difference between knowing exactly what keywords to target and then creating the content to match versus aimlessly creating content that achieves nothing.