How Long Tail Keywords Can Benefit Your SEO Campaign
Long tail SEO keywords, as the name suggests, are made up of a number of words that create a phrase. These phrases will then help you to be optimised for those words, particularly in the particular order in which they are written.
Because these keywords, or phrases, are longer they tend to have a greatly reduced competition rate. But as with all things in SEO, one positive is usually counterweighted by a negative; in this case the downside is that traffic for longer terms is usually significantly reduced. However, it’s not all bad news as I’ll now try to explain.
Firstly, when somebody searches for something using three or more words they tend to know exactly what it is they’re looking for. This means that they’re far more likely to use your services or buy the products that you offer. Traffic in research mode is absolutely fine, but for to improve your conversion rate you need to be as focussed as possible.
Another noticeable benefit is that long tail keywords tend to also be short tail terms in disguise. Whilst you may be focussing on the longer form of the phrase – for example ‘Leading UK Building Supplies Company’. Within this one phrase you have actually used a number of individual terms and combinations, for example:
UK Building Supplies
Leading Building Supplies
Building Supplies Company
Building Supplies
This elongation of key terms being used can be hugely beneficial, particularly for any website that is just starting out in their optimisation efforts. Short tail phrases, which use one word or two, tend to be hugely competitive. This means that it can be very difficult to overtake others who have already invested huge amounts of time in ensuring that their site is fully strengthened. So by using a long tail phrase that includes your short tail terms, you can optimise for both, but ensure that you are ranking for the longer keyword strings.
It might not be exactly the phrase you want, but if you are smart and use your phrases in appropriate quantities in the right place, you could find yourself attracting some highly targeted traffic and getting on the search engines’ radar for a few terms. You will also be building up the strength of your short tail keywords too, so your efforts won’t be in vain as you should slowly start to see improvements for your primary one/two word phrases.
So long tail phrases can be your friend. It would certainly take a brave site owner to overlook their potential and stick with their short tails. SEO is a strange mix of focus and variation, to get the most out of your website you need to expand keywords and develop their various combinations throughout your body copy, titles and Meta.
