Long Tail Keywords – The Most Profitable SEO Strategy For Small Business Websites

What are long tail keywords?

Long-tail keywords are keywords or keyword phrases for which there are relatively few competitors on search engine results pages. They usually consist of three, four or more keywords and are less competitive because they are not searched as often. For that very reason, they can be very lucrative for web publishers and small business websites.

The term “long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of “Wired” magazine for his book “The Long Tail.” It refers to the shape of an economic distribution curve that graphically represents the basic supply and demand of the digital economy. In particular, it refers to the tail end of the curve where demand is very, very low.

Understand long tail keywords

To give you an example of a long-tail keyword, let’s say your business is a Denver-based marketing and website design company. You can target a broad keyword for your website like “Web Design” or you can target a long-tail keyword phrase like “Denver Website Design” or “Colorado Business Website Design.”

What’s the difference (in terms of website traffic results)?

My most recent Google search for the term “web design” (in quotes) returned over 134 million search engine results! Granted, many of those results may not be directly relevant and may include things like robotically generated pages, web fonts, and all sorts of other things. The point remains that the competition for that keyword phrase is colossal!

Any web page you create to target that phrase is likely to be too far behind at the bottom of Google’s search engine results pages to be of much use for generating web design leads.

On the other hand, my search for “Denver website design” (also in quotes) returned less than 8,000 results…a much more manageable number. When I narrowed it down further by including the word “business”, as in “Denver Business website design” (still in quotes), I ended up with 5 results listed.

Some benefits of a long-tail keyword strategy

Keywords are the basis of how Google and other major search engines filter the web to match information seekers with relevant web pages. A website with proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization) uses keywords to attract traffic from search engine results pages.

Here are some important benefits of adopting a long-tail keyword strategy when developing your content and planning your website architecture (for SEO purposes).

has. less competition

There are 2 aspects of website content strategy that you need to master in order to create a business website that is highly effective at generating leads and getting targeted web visitor traffic. The first is keyword research. The other is competitive intelligence research.

Not only do you need to target keywords that your ideal prospects and customers search for in significant numbers, but you also need to always know how much competition you’ll have to navigate before your specific web content appears on the first page of Google and other searches. engines

By staying away from hyper-competitive keywords and keyword phrases, you can gain momentum by winning the first page of Google for many long-tail keywords. This momentum becomes a self-perpetuating snowball of traffic as more and more traffic is referred to you from the first page for these related terms. Google starts bidding your website on top of other related terms.

b. More profitable web traffic

The specificity of these long-tail terms makes them much more effective at attracting highly targeted, ready-to-buy prospects. A person searching for the term “market research” is likely to be looking for general information. It could be a student from a developing country that is not part of your target market.

On the other hand, a search for “Denver market research services” likely means this person is in the Denver area and is actively looking to hire a market research firm for the area. This principle also applies to product-focused long-tail keywords like “Sony CCD 420 TVL Security Camera.”

against Increased Traffic Stability

Some unethical SEO consultants and firms tell their clients partial truths by making a big deal out of placing them #1 for a single relevant long-tail keyword. Many times, that keyword is geographically specific and it’s not that hard to rank for it temporarily.

However, business owners are then dismayed when they discover that their website soon disappears from search engine results for that keyword if they don’t pay monthly SEO maintenance fees. Much of the money spent in this way is wasted.

Instead, most small businesses would find that their marketing dollars would be much better spent targeting a large number of highly relevant and well-researched long-tail keywords, and creating content that would pre-sell their products and services.

If you do this, your website will eventually rank high for specific long-tail keywords and many related keywords that you don’t actively optimize for. That’s because Google and the other search engines start doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.