You want to rank your business higher in search results. You may have heard about long-tail keywords, but you’re not sure what they are and why they are essential. Read on for the whats and whys of long-tail keywords.
What are Long-Tail Keywords?
In search engine optimization (SEO), there are head keywords, and then there are long-tail keywords. Unlike head keywords, the long-tail variant is much more specific and usually consists of more words. The head keyword is the general topic or title everyone hears about, and the long-tail keyword is the subtopic of that head. In most cases, there is less content that acts as subheadings.
How does it help?
Fewer people focus on long-tail keywords, which means less competition to target the content! Plus, because of how specific long-tailed keywords are, you can be more target-specific as well! Ask yourself, “Is someone looking to buy stuff or looking for info? Alternatively, perhaps something else entirely?” Focus on what your customer is looking for or has an issue with and use these as your keywords.
Long-Tail Keyword Examples
Here’s an example to help you better understand the concept of long-tail keywords. Imagine a head keyword, “Drawing Books for Kids,” which is quite a general topic. If your website is brand new, ranking with such a keyword would be virtually impossible. Other sites such as Amazon will beat you to it.
What you need do is to find a niche. A niche means a specific set of groups. You can accomplish this by utilising long-tail keywords! An example of a long-tail keyword header would be “Drawing books for autistic toddlers.” If your content about such a specific topic is high-quality, you can easily beat out the competition. If you want to target an audience that wants to purchase such books, you can include a guide on how to do so as well!
Long-Tail Keywords + Long-term Strategy
You might be thinking, “It would be wonderful to rank for a head keyword rather than a long-tail keyword!” If you can achieve it, that’s amazing, although ranking even 10th place won’t do you any good. It might increase traffic, but it won’t impact sales or inquiries. If you’re a new business, it is best that you start with long-tail keywords, as there is much less competition. Once you’ve started to rank for those, you can begin to aim closer and closer to the head terms.
Like the example above, “Drawing books for autistic toddlers,” you can even write “How to train your autistic child with hand-eye coordination” and other more specialised topics. This way, Google will recognise your speciality in such materials.
If you bundle all these similar topics together, you can make the main article that leads to all the other sub-articles. Grouping topics will boost your chance of getting your main article ranked higher. When this method shows signs that it works, you can start writing high-quality content for other topics. After a while, you’ll get closer and closer to head terms, which is called the cornerstone strategy.
Increase Conversions
Having less competition isn’t the only advantage you’ll get from long-tail keywords. Focusing on the niche gives you a higher chance of converting a visitor to a customer as well! Imagine, you’re looking for a particular item, and find a website that caters to that exact item you need, and you purchase it from them. The same goes for your customers!
Long-tail keywords are a ticket for you to get ranked higher in the search engine. Start writing about long-tail keywords today and see the traffic and conversion rates increase!
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