Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEO ~ MD Internet Marketing Solutions

Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEO

Why Long Tail Keywords Are So Important To Your SEO

Keywords – the basis for every SEO campaign.  Target the wrong keywords and you will rank, but you may not see a decent ROI from your campaigns. Traditionally, SEO’s have gone after just one to two keywords together to target. Then you have longer keyword phrases, and these are generally 3 or more words together that you are targeting. Longer keyword phrases can also be referred to as “Long Tail Keywords”.

Long tail keywords are a must to be targeting in your SEO campaigns. Why? Well we are about to give you several reasons as to why you should be going after them and how much it can benefit your business.

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To give you an idea of what I mean, let’s look at the service our business performs as an example. “SEO” would be a rather short keyword to target. On the other hand “The Best Local SEO Consulting Services In Atlanta” would be a long tail.

So why would it be better to try and rank for The Best Local SEO Consulting Services In Atlanta over just SEO? Well, number 1 – SEO would be much harder to rank for. The reason for this is that this is going to be a “Global” search term, where as with the long tail it has a geo modifier at the end, so that I am only competing with other SEO’s in Atlanta and not all over the world.

Secondly, commercial intent or buyer intent. With the keyword “SEO”, the person performing the search could be looking for anything about SEO, such as “how to”, or “what is”. Our long tail keyword example has a lot better commercial intent. Click Here To Learn More About Keywords With Commercial Intent.

Nowadays people aren’t just typing their search either. People are able to just speak their search into their phones. With long tail keywords you are getting more natural speech patterns that happen from speaking your search. Ashley Faulkes wrote a post over on Mad Lemmings that explains more on long tails and also gives another example that I like:

The Power of Long Tail Keywords

People are searching more specifically these days, and often with complete sentences.

So instead of: best restaurant Zurich

(yes I live near Zurich)

People are now writing (or talking) : What is the best Chinese restaurant near my house in Zurich?

This trend has been increasing for a quite a few years. And it means that people are typing in longer phrases into Google, in order to find exactly what they are looking for.

This could mean a more specific location, type, piece of information and so on.

These are the long tail keywords. The less common, more specific, keywords people are using. The kinds of keywords not so many people are targeting with their content!

The Benefits of Long Tail Keywords

You can read a lot more about this in this article on Search Engine Watch, but the short version is –

Long Tail Keywords are very useful because:

  • There is less competition
  • The results are highly relevant
  • There is often more specific user intent (they are searching for exactly what they want)

Continue Reading Here..

The very last bullet point “There is often more specific user intent” can also be interpreted as a higher commercial intent. His first bullet point -“There is less competition” means – it is easier to rank for!

So how do you come up with these long tail keywords?

The Google Keyword Planner doesn’t work so well for this. You also need to remember that the planner was also created for PPC, and NOT keyword research.

If you are having a hard time analyzing and coming up with long tails on your own, the good news is that there are a few free ways of doing this.

A great way is by using Google suggests. This method is probably best done on your laptop or desktop so that you can open a Word document or Notepad to keep up with the results.

No go to Google and type in your 1 – 3 regular keywords. Once the results populate, scroll all the way down the page to the end of the ads and you should see something like this –

 

That is a goldmine for potential long tail keywords for you to rank for! 2 long tail keywords were produced here – search engine optimization atlanta and best atlanta seo company. Now you can also look through those results and see if there are totally different keywords that have appeared that are related to your niche. Next take those keywords and put those into the search bar and check those results as well. In no time you can have a rather large list of long tails to target!

Sometimes, depending on your keywords, as you type your keywords into the search bar, Google will try and anticipate what you are searching for, so pay attention to those results as well.

We also found these tools over at LongTailGenerator.com and Uber Suggest that may help you as well.

You Don’t Have To ReBuild Your Website

Now you may be thinking – “Great! Now I have to completely rewrite my website!” –  I promise you that’s not the case.

Over at the Hosting news they just made a post that explains this:

An Easy Way to Target Longtail Keywords

You don’t have to redesign your entire website to target longtail keywords. Instead, you can start using your blog to capture traffic from these highly targeted phrases. It’s not necessary to target longtail keywords on your homepage or landing pages, unless they really fit well with what you offer. However, they make perfect sense in a blog post.

When you want to target a longtail keyword phrase, simply write a blog post around the keyword phrase. This will not only give you the ability to rank for the phrase, but it can also bring up the entire SEO portfolio of your website. Read The Full Article “Why do Longtail Keywords Matter So Much?

That’s pretty sweet! And easy as well. This can also make it possible for your website, or in actuality, your blog posts to rank for a lot more terms and drive a lot more traffic which equals – MORE SALES AND CLIENTS!

In Conclusion

So to sum it all up, the biggest reasons you need to be using Long Tail keywords in your SEO campaigns are –

  1. Less Competition
  2. Easier Rankings
  3. Higher Commercial Intent

So get to it! Find some long tail keywords and start writing some blog posts to target them to get more traffic and more importantly – MORE SALES!

 

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