What are Long-Tail Keywords? And How to Use Them

 

If you picture a normalized bell curve with most common searches for a topic in the meat of the curve, the long-tail keywords are the edge with diminishing volume. A long-tail keyword is less about the length of the phrase searched, and more about where it appears in the curve.

Searches on the long end of the curve are more niche or more specific. The two benefits, if you sell a service online, of ranking for long-tail keywords include,

1. these users making long-tail searches are more likely to convert – they know specifically what they are looking for. If you have what they want, and you can rank well for it, you have a great combination.

2. if you are a new business or a business with a lot of content, you can rank for long-tail keywords, while you are working on driving traffic for less targeted phrases.

One real example we give is this – people searching for Cowboy Boots are not likely to buy, but people searching for Men’s Justin Ropers in Black are very likely to buy. (we have the data to prove it – our client converted 0.7% to 1% of Cowboy Boot searches on a given day. – we ranked in the top 3 for the term and would get 250 visits a day on the term and sell 2-4 pairs of the boot.

On any given day, we would get 1,000s of visits for Long Tail Keywords, and we would covert 2-16% – depending on the search term. (Justin Ropers in Black converted 16% consistently.) For those of you that have been around SEO for some time still remember when Google would tell you what your traffic searched for per user that landed. Those days are long gone.

Conclusion: Ranking for Long Tail Keywords is worth the time and the effort.