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Dramatically Improve SEO Strategy with Long Tail Keywords

Dramatically Improve SEO Strategy in 2022 with Long Tail Keywords

Do you want to rank higher in Google? Do you want your website to get more traffic, and convert those visitors into customers? Then it’s time for a little SEO (search engine optimization) upgrade. The best way to do that is by introducing long tail keywords into your strategy.

Here’s how.

What Are Long tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are specific, niche-based search phrases that people use when searching for something online. These user-specific searches are targeted towards a very specific set of results, rather than the more general catch all phrases used by searchers to get their initial list of results (known as a head term, head keyword or a short tail keyword).

Generally, long tail keywords are defined as search queries of more than 3 words, while head terms (or short tail keywords) are defined as search queries containing 1 or 2 words.

Why Are Long Tail Keywords So Important?

Before I answer this question, I’d like to pose a different question:

What’s the goal of your content marketing strategy?

You probably don’t have a single, neat answer to this question. However, I’m willing to bet that your current content marketing strategy is motivated primarily by a desire to increase your traffic and conversions.

Many brands and businesses look to paid advertising-or pay per click advertising (PPC)-as a means to achieve these goals. While PPC is relatively effective, there’s a problem-you’re paying for clicks! That means that there’s a linear relationship between the number of leads you are attracting and your marketing expenditure.

To illustrate, let’s compare the ROIs of two equally costly marketing campaigns (one PPC and one SEO):

As you can see, PPC’s relationship with customer acquisition is almost perfectly linear-spend $X attract Y new customers. On the other hand, SEO’s relationship to customer acquisition is exponential. That means there’s much greater potential for scalability baked into the process. That’s the reason to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

How Do Long Tail Keywords Fit Into All This?

Now that we have that background information out of the way, it’s time to cover what it is that makes long tail keywords so important.

Let’s look at two Google queries:

“dentists”

“dentists in Brisbane Australia”

If you happen to be a dentist based in Brisbane, connecting with the searcher behind for that second query is far more likely to result in a sale. That’s because of the specificity of their search term indicates someone who is motivated to locate (and visit) a dentist in Brisbane, Australia. In other words, targeting long tail helps businesses attract higher quality organic traffic.

It’s not just businesses who benefit, though. Web browsers implicitly understand that queries including long tail keywords are more likely to yield the results they want. That’s why 54.3% percent of all Google searches are long tail.

 

To summarize, long tail keywords are important because:

They attract high-quality traffic.

They make up the majority of searches.

Now, it’s time to learn how to find and integrate them!

5 Steps For Finding and Integrate Long Tail Keywords

Without further ado, here’s our 5-step process for finding and integrating long tail keywords:

Step 1: Set Your Content Marketing Objectives

SEO is a process, not a result.

Before you get to the “fun stuff” (i.e., writing and optimizing content), it’s important to build an operational framework to use when structuring your campaigns. That means having a think about what your goals are.

For example, do you want your business to:

Attract more customers?

Generate sales leads?

Drive brand awareness among a particular market segment?

The goals that you set will determine how you target your audience with long tail keyword research. For example, if your goal is to attract high-ticket leads, then your primary keyword might be “luxury car rental Brisbane” as opposed to simply “car rentals Brisbane”.

Step 2: Understand Who Makes Up Your Market

Different searchers are motivated by different things at different times. In other words, there isn’t a silver bullet keyword research strategy that can direct every searcher to your website. Instead of trying to find one, you’re far better off getting specific and using long tail keywords to target certain segments of the market.

To do this, you’ll need to create customer profiles-cheat sheets detailing the characteristics, pain points, and desires of your ideal customer.

An example might be:

Description: Young professional looking for luxury car rental services while on business trips to Brisbane, Australia.

Age Range: 26-35

Top Priority: Demonstrating professionalism, success, and class.

Pain Points: Lack of luxury car availability at the Brisbane airport.

Based on this profile, you might decide to target the long tail keyword “Brisbane airport luxury car rental”.

Step 3: Use Google’s Related Searches To Find Related Long tail Keywords

Another method for finding long tail keywords is to use Google’s “Related Searches” feature.

To try this out, type a broad keyword (e.g., “dentist Brisbane”) into the Google search bar and then hit enter. Scroll down to the bottom of the search result page, and you’ll find that Google has automatically generated a list of 8 related, long tail keywords – just for you!

These are generated based on relevancy and search volume. Both of these traits mean they’re a great place to start when looking for long tail keyword ideas. You can also look in Google Search Console to check which keywords are already finding your website.

Step 4: Use Your Competitors’ Content To Identify Long Tail Keywords

To find long tail keywords, you can also use your competitors’ content as a starting point. You can do this by reading through a piece of content and making an educated guess, or by using an SEO tool.

Once you have this information, you’ll be able to make educated guesses about other long tail keywords related to whatever it is that makes them unique.

To find out what long tail keywords your competitors are using, we recommend the paid Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool. You may need to pay for a month of this service so make sure you prepare all your research.  This takes the top five search results for any given keyword and then shows the URLs that every site is linking to (i.e., they’re ranking). Use this information to identify other relevant queries with significant search volume, too!

If you are using Google Ads you can also look in the Google Keyword Planner to see the volumes on keywords.

Step 5: Use A Dedicated Long Tail Keyword Suggestion Tool

Still struggling to find long tail keywords to target? You can always resort to one of the many keyword research generation tools out there.

One of these options is Ubersuggest – a paid service (with a 7 day free trial) that recommends long tail keywords based on related head terms. All you need to do is enter a head term (e.g., “dentist Brisbane”) and click enter. The program then sifts through Google search volume data and generates a list of suggested keywords.

You can then sort the list of suggestions by their competition level, cost per click, or search volume depending on the goals of your campaign. All of this makes it much easier to develop an effective SEO strategy with targeted traffic in mind.

Wrapping Up

There you have it-a 5-step plan for finding the best long tail keywords to target. All that’s left to do now is integrate them into your content.

While there isn’t a hard and fast rule here, it’s important that your keywords make an appearance as often as possible. However, Google has truly become a semantic search engine. It’s capable of discerning whether a piece of content is actually providing value or whether it’s abusing keyword density as a way to cheat the system. Always optimize your content for search engine users before you worry about things like keyword density.

Hopefully, this article will help you use long tail keywords to upgrade your content marketing strategy. When used correctly, long tail keywords can help you tap into a world of targeted and relevant traffic.