What is long tail SEO? Long tail SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) refers to the keywords you target on your website with your content. Most short tail phrases (2-3 words) will have massive competition in the search results pages (SERPS). As such it’s very difficult to create content for them and rank anywhere near the top of the first page of the SERPS. Without a top ranking, it’s difficult to get free traffic to your website.
Long tail SEO is worth doing because it allows you to target longer chains of words with your content. Because there’s so much less competition for long tail keywords, you have a far greater chance of getting found on Google, and getting free traffic.
A quick browse of Google’s keyword planner brings up hundreds of keywords which are being search for. By aiming for the “low hanging fruit”, that is, those keywords with less competition, you can build content which gets traffic for free.
What Is Long Tail SEO And Why Use It?
Long tail keywords are a good source of free traffic if you can build good content for them and get a ranking. Depending on your niche and the keywords you choose, you’ll find it more or less difficult to make this work. If you have just started out and have a new website, it’s going to be more difficult because you won’t have any authority with Google. You’re competing with thousands of other bloggers for visibility on Google; many of whom have been around for years, building content and backlinks.
By going after long strings of keywords instead of short ones, you give yourself a better chance of your content getting found. Here’s a few of the keywords which came up when I searched for ideas for this article:
Although these top keywords have a lot of monthly traffic, I wouldn’t have much chance ranking for them. There’s simply too much competition to make it worth my while. But a further look down the list and you can see some longer tail ideas:
Two of these I already picked out and I have written content for. You can see them below:
Benefits Of Long Tail Keywords
There’s a few benefits to creating content in your niche through targeting long tail keywords. Firstly you have more chance of getting found but long tail keywords are also much more targeted. Someone looking for a long tail keyword has a much better idea of what they want. The long tail keywords searches are more specific. If you’re selling something on your website, this means you get a more targeted search query.
This is useful if you’re selling a service or a product because you can find customers more easily. For example, the term affiliate marketing is a very broad term. Someone searching for affiliate marketing might simply want to know what it is. But someone searching for affiliate marketing step by step for beginners is more likely to be looking for some kind of product or training program.
This is great for marketers because it means you not only save money on your marketing budget by getting free traffic, but you also attract very specific search queries which are relevant to your product/service.
Blogging
Blogging using long tail keywords is a great option for marketers therefore because it allows them to create content which can attract an audience. Once this content is created, it can attract buying customers for free; saving you money on paid advertising.
The downside of blogging is that it is time consuming. But you can out source this particular task if you’re not interested in doing it yourself. You can find people to create content for you on websites such as Fiver.com and Upwork.com.
Blogging isn’t an instant win, and depending on how competitive the topic is, you might find you’ll need to create a lot of content just to start generating only a small amount of traffic. But over time this can grow and your efforts will compound over time the more content you have. As you increase the number of blog posts you have, there will come a tipping point. This is where your content starts ranking and people start sharing and linking to your content. At this point, your blog grows organically. More traffic equals more shares and links, which further increase your authority with the search engines.
To get this to happen it’s important to create good quality content which stands the test of time.