long tail keywords Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

There’s a couple of reasons why long tail keywords are important. Despite the fact they get less monthly searches than shorter tail keywords, they also have far less competition on the SERPS (search engine results pages). This means if you use long tail keywords in your content, you have a much better chance of them finding their way to the first page of Google. This means free traffic if you can do it and although there’s considerably less traffic for those key phrases, there’s more chance of a ranking.

A small “cut” of something is worth much more than no share of everything!

If you go after the more competitive keywords, in the hope that all that traffic will be yours, you’ll be disappointed. Your chance of getting ranked for such competitive keywords on the first page of Google is vastly diminished by the huge volume of competing content. Your content may rank on page 10 of Google though, but no-one scrolls through to look at page 10 for their search query.

Why Long Tail Keywords Are Important: Downsides

There’s downsides too of building content using long tail keywords.

Even if your content appears on page one of Google at the very top, you’ll still be sharing the clicks with the adverts and other top few listings. So the main problem with long tail keywords is the lack of traffic. If your long tail keyword gets 30 views a month, for example that’s only one click a day! So even if you get a third of that traffic, it’s only 1 click every 3 days! Since many web based searchers will leave your website after only a few seconds, you can see how this strategy is a very long term one!

Still, if you build enough content, those small numbers add up. Plus, as Google recognises you as an authority on your topic, they are likely to give your SEO (search engine optimisation) a boost too. This all takes time and a lot of work to achieve. More and more people are building content as I write. So there’s a growing amount of competing content.

If you’re aiming for ranking for long tail keywords, it’s well worth writing a good lengthy piece of content which out performs those which rank already. Often Google won’t even rank your content above another, older piece because you haven’t built up the authority to outrank them. Google may not trust you yet, even though your content may be far longer and more superior to the existing one which Google ranks at the top.

A top ranking article might have tens of thousands of back links, which is very difficult to compete with as a newcomer.

Why Long Tail Keywords Are Important: Alternatives

But what’s the alternative? Pay for traffic? Or build content differently? Another way of building content is to write catchy titles and help them go viral. You can look on a site called Buzzsumo.com to find some of the top trending articles. With a good title, more people are more likely to click on the link to read your content. But you first need to get it in front of people in the first place, which means promotion on social media.

Another alternative is to target shorter tail keywords which have more competition. But again you need content promotion to get your articles seen. Even with long tail keyword targeted article, your content might not rank. With a shorter tail keyword, it’s much less likely to rank still.

Short Tail Vs. Long Tail Keywords

Here’s a few examples of short tail and long tail keywords. Let’s start with the title of this article “why long tail keywords are important”. To find long and short tail keywords, type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner. I started with “why long tail keywords” as my main keyword in this instance and here’s the results the planner brought up:

As you can see, the keyword I chose only gets 30 monthly searches. So if I ranked on top of Google for this keyword, I’d still have to share 1 click a day with the other top ranking websites (and of course adverts, if there are any).

However, let’s look at a more competitive keyword for comparison.

“Long tail” as a keyword search gets 40,500 monthly visits! Surely I’d be better going after a slice of this traffic? To answer this question we can have a look at the Google search results for a simple search of this keyword and a “phrase” match search.

Have a look at the number at the top of the image above. That’s over 1 billion competing search results. Plus, investopedia.com is the top search result, a very well established and high authority site (difficult to outrank). A phrase match search gives us a closer idea to the competing websites which have this phrase targeted specifically with their content:

Still the number is pretty high as you’d expect from such a short term phrase as “long tail”. Over 29 million competing search results here.

Comparing Keywords

Now let’s compare these results to my longer tail key phrase I used for this blog title.

That’s still a pretty high number at over 45 and a half million, but it’s still a lot less competition than “long tail” was. You can see though that the phrase match for this keyword has a much lower number. This might give me a chance to rank this piece of content for that particular keyword.

Summary

While I’m not going to get a huge amount of traffic even if this content ranks at the very top of Google, each piece of content you create adds up to domain authority with Google. With thousands of pieces of content on a site, all these articles add up and increase search traffic and domain authority at the same time.

At the beginning of a blogging journey, it can seem daunting to create hundreds of pieces of content only for a small amount of traffic. But over time your efforts compound and eventually you can have a passive income from blogging with this strategy, if you put the work in.

At around 300-400 blog posts you should see an uptick in traffic. As you continue writing more and more content, this compounds to dramatically boost numbers of visitors to your website.

The other important thing about long tail keywords is that they bring in much more targeted traffic than shorter tail keywords do. Take our earlier example of “long tail” versus “why long tail keywords are important”. You can see the second phrase is much more specific. If you’re an affiliate or are promoting something from your website this is pretty important. A shorter phrase is very general while a longer term phrase will bring a different type of visitor to your website. If you can target the long tail phrases which are the most relevant for your business, you can not only bring traffic to your site, but targeted traffic: people who will buy from you!

Why find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty? Simple; it’s so you can rank your content on Google, and the other search engines: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com etc.

Any topic you want to blog about has a number of search terms which you can find using the free search tool Google’s keyword planner. Looking at the search terms for a given topic you might think to go for the terms which get the highest number of searches. But that’s a mistake if you’re a blogger. Most of these terms are far too competitive to rank your content for. So your articles will probably never rank in the first page of the search results for them, should you try.

Taking the example above you would think that “long tail keywords” is the term to write content for. It gets 14,800 searches every month on Google according to the planner tool. But let’s take a look at the competition for this keyword in the organic search results using Google.

find long tail keywords with low seo difficulty

The above image shows the search term “long tail keywords” in the Google search results as a “phrase” match – meaning in quotation marks. This shows the number of competing pages which are shown by Google with that phrase in their website/page. The number is 881,000 shown at the top of the page. That’s a lot of competing websites targeting this term. Then let’s look at the term without quotation marks:

A basic search of the term “long tail keywords” brings up 126 million competing pages for an open search (without quotation marks). Again, this shows a lot of competing websites for the term. Looking through the results too shows a hefty number of high authority sites ranking in the top few.

Find Long Tail Keywords With Low SEO Difficulty

So as an example of a search term “long tail keywords” stands out as a difficult one to rank. To get free traffic from the search engines you’ll need to get your content seen within the first page of Google, ideally. There’s also Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com too, but there’s much less traffic available from these search engines. So even though they might give you a higher ranking than Google, you can’t base your strategy entirely from these search engines.

To win a place in the first page of the Google listings for your search term, you’ll need to dig a little deeper and find the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. To do this you’ll need to look at the search terms which attract fewer searches, but which also have far less competition on the search results page. You can do this by clicking on the average monthly searches tab in the keyword planner (see video below).

Find Long Tail Keywords With Low SEO Difficulty

Once you do this you’ll notice that the search terms get a lot less traffic than the more competitive ones. But 10% of a low number is better than 0% of a high one. With a high competition keyword, your chances of getting free traffic are incredibly small. You’ll be competing with high authority domain names which have tens of thousands of back links. So even if I chose the keyword for this article which gets 14,800 searches every month, chances are low that I would get any free traffic from Google for it. So 0% of 14,800 is still 0!

One the other hand, I found the long tail keyword which I intend to rank this article for: find long tail keywords with low seo difficulty.

As you can see from the planner, this keyword only gets 90 monthly searches on Google. This is far lower than the 14,800 from the more competitive keyword (long tail keywords). But moving to the search results and typing in my keyword it’s a very different story from the shorter keyword. Compared to the number for the shorter phrase (126 million), this shorter phrase only gets 451,000 pages listed. This gives me a much better change of ranking for it, particularly if I do a good piece of content.

However you can also see a bunch of adverts for this search phrase which means that even ranking near or at the top of the page, you’ll still have competition. But the goal is only to get a trickle of traffic from each of these kinds of article. By creating lots of content, and targeting long tail keywords, you have the chance of getting free traffic to your website from a number of sources.

Niche Blogging For Profit

A few years ago I created this ebook – Niche Blogging For Profit. The strategy is the same – find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

At the time there were fewer competing websites for keywords than there are today. But the strategy still stands. It just takes a little time and effort to find the gems which have fewer competition. You also want to choose keywords which relate to your subject of course. If you go too far off course, you could have people coming to your site to read content which has nothing to do with what you’re offering.

So the basic rules of the strategy I use are this:

Find long tail keywords which relate to your subject and which will attract buyer traffic
Choose keywords which have less than 20,000 competing pages for “phrase match” (use quotation marks)
Use keywords which have fewer than 10,000,000 for open match (no quotation marks)
Use the existing best ranking websites also as a measure of the likelihood of your getting a place on Google for the keyword you research.
Keep learning from your experience and fine tune the strategy as you go.

Content Quality

Of course finding your long tail keywords is only half of the story. You still have to create content around your chosen keywords. Google uses many algorithms to determine how people perceive your content. So make it as good as you can and write at least 1000 words, more if you can. You want your content to be “evergreen”. It can take months before your content gets the attention it deserves. But if it’s evergreen, this should serve you for much longer than a short piece of content which quickly goes out of date.

I use an SEO plugin and social share plugins to help me syndicate content out via social media, too. More on content creation and plugins in my article: create free website and earn money.

Plugins I use:

Yoast SEO – helps you write content with SEO in mind
Revive Old Posts – automatically syndicates new and older content you have created out through social media
Social media share plugins – gives readers the option to share your content.

Summary

In this article I’ve used the example of the keyword “long tail keywords”. But of course you can choose any keyword which is within the niche you work. Make sure you know your target audience before you start out so you can maximise your efforts and attract the right kind of people to your website. See how to know your target market.

Nothing is guaranteed with blogging! Google can be tough nut to crack and this strategy is just that – a strategy. But through finding long tail keywords you can have more chance to rank your content if it is deemed good enough by Google.

It can take some time before your blog is recognised too by Google. Especially in the early months; many sites are sandboxed by Google and you don’t see results quickly. In some cases it can take months before your content shows. Check other search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo which can rank your content quicker than Google will.

Keep going and continue creating more and more content. If you use this strategy with a die hard attitude, eventually you’ll start to see some traffic. Once you do, give yourself a pat on the back and let this result give you the enthusiasm to keep going and create more and more.