Benefits of Using Longtail Keywords

SEO is changing daily and even SEO pros can’t always follow all the new twists of search engines. If you are in a competitive niche and you have targeted competitive keywords, a single minor change in the algorithms of search engines can bury your site in search results.

That’s the problem with competitive keywords: one minute you’re in the top three search results, the next your site is nowhere to be found. But even if you don’t experience such drastic shifts, one possible direction of SEO you can take is longtail keywords. Longtail keywords can be very useful – and lucrative in PPC advertising – and if you don’t use them yet, you should definitely consider them.

What are longtail keywords?

Basically, longtail keywords are all those minor keywords that bring you very few hits a month per keyword, but these hits are very well targeted. The power of longtail keywords comes from the amount of longtail keywords you’re using.

For instance if you are in the mortgage niche, most likely you know that the keyword ‘mortgage’ is very competitive both in terms of search volume, competition, and PPC costs. If you are a webmaster and you somehow manage to get to the first page on Google for ‘mortgage’ this will bring you lots of traffic. Alternatively, if you are an affiliate marketer and you run PPC campaigns, you probably hate when you have to pay $20+ per click.

In either case, ‘mortgage’ is too expensive and takes too much effort to target, though the revenue could be very rewarding. If we continue the example with the mortgage niche, most likely your site is targeted to a subset of mortgage terms, such as ‘mortgage for bad credit’ or ‘mortgage for second home’, or even ‘mortgage for second home bad credit’.

These couple of keyphrases could be a great choice of longtail keywords to optimize for because, unlike ‘mortgage’ only, these keywords are very specific and they won’t bring you visitors who are looking for general information about mortgages, or mortgage calculators, or the advantages/disadvantages of mortgages, or mortgages as a way to refinance a business, etc. but exactly those visitors you’re looking for.

Considered separately, each of the longtail keywords might account for only a few hits a month, but when combined, longtail keywords build an impressive search volume of highly targeted traffic. Longtail keywords are usually 3-6 word search phrases and once you identify them correctly, they will work diligently for you.

Why you should use longtail keywords

Longtail keywords might not be high-volume keywords but their benefits are so tangible that you can’t afford to skip them. Some of the major benefits of longtail keywords are:

• Longtail keywords bring more targeted traffic. As the example in the previous section shows, longtail keywords bring targeted traffic – i.e. only the people who are interested exactly in mortgages for second homes or mortgages for bad credit.
• There is less competition for longtail keywords. Longtail keywords aren’t as easy to come by as one word or short keyword phrases. Also, many people won’t bother to do extended keyword research for their site. For these less competitive keywords your site will appear on the first pages in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
• With longtail keywords conversions are higher. This benefit of longtail keywords is especially important if you are running a PPC campaign with high per click values because in your case it is evident that what matters is not the quantity but the quality of visitors you attract. If you are promoting mortgages for bad credit, you are not interested in all those visitors who are just looking for a basic mortgage info because these visitors are unlikely to convert. Since the visitors you are getting for longtail keywords are extremely well targeted, this generally leads to more conversions for you.

Longtail keywords are really a good deal and the question is not if you should use them but more how to find suitable longtail keywords to optimize for.

How to find suitable longtail keywords to optimize for

Basically, there are two ways to find suitable longtail keywords to optimize for:

• Use keyword research tools: You could try keyword research tools, for instance Google External Keyword Tool but it is quite possible that the global/local volume of your longtail keywords is so low, that they are not listed at all. You can also try Wordtracker’s free keyword tool, or Keyword Discovery’s free version. (More free keyword tools…)
• Analyze your logs. Very often you don’t have to find longtail keywords because they do find you: look at your logs and dig for all those minor keywords with low search volume you get hits for once in a while and this might be all the keyword research you have to perform.

Longtail keywords might be harder to identify than major keywords but if you manage to discover the longtail keywords that work for you, this could have a really positive impact on your search engine optimization efforts and will bring a continuous stream of targeted traffic.
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