Are you currently focusing your SEO and PPC efforts on high traffic generic keywords or long tail keywords? The difference between the two is huge and can mean a big difference in traffic levels and cost for your business.
What are long tail keywords?
Long tail SEO is a white hat SEO process that involves targeting less competitive, highly specific search terms (long tail keywords). Since over 70% of all search queries are for long tail terms, there is incredible value in taking control of those keywords. See full infographic below for more details.
Need some examples?
Let’s take PPC.org for example. Ideally we would love to eventually rank for the keywords “ppc” and “pay per click” on the first page of Google, but those are some extremely generic and high target keywords. Instead we can effectively go after long tail versions of these keywords with much less competition, yet still reaching a targeted audience.
Let’s head over to Google Keyword tool and put “pay per click” marketing in to show you an example.
From the report above you can see that over 1.2 million searches are done for “ppc” each month, and another 200,000 searches are for “pay per click”. These are more generic terms, so let’s move on and look at the long tail keywords we can focus on instead.
You will see all of the keywords listed above have a “HIGH” competition, but if you went through the full list there are a bunch of MEDIUM and LOW competitive keywords as well. The goal is to write original articles and focus your topics on long tail keywords to rank for those terms.
Another piece of advice is to always keep breaking down your keywords. Let’s choose “google pay per click” from the screenshot above, then add that into the Google Keyword tool and see how it breaks down a whole new for us with new long tail keyword ideas.
Now that you have a better idea of what long tail keywords are and how to find them, also check out the infographic below from HitTail.
