When launching a new website or just starting SEO on an existing website, it is better to target longtail keywords and key phrases in your SEO strategy. It is a bad idea to target and optimize your web pages for main keywords which usually consist of 1 to 2 words.
What Is Longtail Keywords And Key Phrases?
According to Wikipedia, the longtail is a type of statistical distribution where a high-frequency population is followed by a low-frequency population which gradually “tails off”.
The longtail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combinations and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant traffic.
The Benefits Of Having Longtail Keywords
It can be hard to blog for a long period of time if no one is visiting your site. With longtail keyword SEO strategy, it should position you in a good starting point and give you the momemtum to continue.
#1 Less Competition
In current globalized market especially online market, it is hard to find non-competitive industry or niche. The competition is everywhere. Your competitors might be there for years with optimized and trusted website, thousands of inbound links. Try to beat them right from the start high value keywords and you will most likely fail.
Short keywords such as seo, search engine optimization, web design and etc are often highly competitive. The reason is short keywords send lots of traffic to website. Usually people will search something by using short keywords. If nothing is found, then they will start trying longtail keywords which is longer in terms of word. So businesses like to chase short keywords due to the fact of high traffic.
In comparison, longtail keywords and key phrases send us less traffic but they are less competitive.
#2 Easier To Rank
There is no award, little traffic for ranking on page 2 or onwards even if it is an competitive and high traffic keyword. According to the Google’s research, people tends to click the link at the top of the page 1 of search result pages.
Longtail keywords are easier and faster to rank on page 1 because they are much more depends on on-page optimization abd you no need many inbound links to get high rankings.
When I was started this blog 2 months ago, I did some research and decided to optimize my page for longtail keywords. If I didn’t do that, I don’t think I will achieve what I have today. Just for your little information, I have around 5,000 visitors per month. This is a good result considering that this is a new blog and people have no idea about me before reading this blog.
#3 More Value
It is easier to convert visitors into sales or subscriber if they are using longtail keywords. Psychologically, people who perform searching using longtail keywords know what they want and we can easily convert them by optimizing our landing page according to their needs.
Although single longtail keyword sends you little traffic but you can target a few longtail keywords within same web page and it will give you a good amount of traffic at the initial point. Eventually you want to rank your website for many of the most valuable phrases but you need the passion and revenue to support those activities. So by focusing on the longtail keywords, it should give you enough passion and revenue for you to look for greater opportunity.
Imagine if no one is visiting your website for a long period of time, what will you do? For me, I will either close down my website or leave it there without updating due to lost of passion and momemtum.
In addition, if we have more longtail keywords which have page 1 rankings, it does help to increase the popularity of our website and make it as one of the authority website. Ultimately it will help us to get better rankings for our highly competive short keywords.
Conclusion
It is not a good choice to target short key phrases or keywords that have 2 or 3 words as they are highly competitive. Targeting longtail keywords is the easiest track you can start with and compete with other established websites.
Please share your experience and thoughts about longtail keywords SEO strategy.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
hi bey… nice blog u have here, great articles too. i’m sure i’ll come back agaian sometime soon
@ysfirdaus,
Thanks, hope you like my future posts too. You can subscribe to my RSS feed so that you can receive latest updates.
great post! I have a question.
Can I know how to do analysis on the longtail keyword that we’re going to optimize, whether the keyword has lot of searches in a month? Or we just simply optimize keyword like “how to bake cheese cake” instead of “cheese cake”?
Regards,
Lee
@Make Money Online,
Thanks for your comment. One suggestion is to start as broad and generic keyword as possible and then drill down. For example, ‘credit card’ is the broad keyword. When you are drilling down, you could find ‘apply singapore credit card’. Then use keyword research tool to check how many visitors it can bring you. Because you don’t to waste effort into those longtail keyword which doesn’t bring you traffic.
I think I’m going to write a blog post about this topic in very near future so that you could have better understanding.
Thanks for sharing. My blog ranks quite well for some longtail keywords. Now that I know more about longtail keywords from you I will try optimizing it more.
Hi!..
I recently started my blog on truzo packing’s. Please suggest me should i go for long tail keywords or short tail keywords.
@Swati,
“Truzo packing” is a non-competitive keyword. I believe you can target short tail keywords. You can always do some keyword research, then you can decide whether to use longtail or short tail.
@Swati,
Just want to add 1 supplement point. If you do some research, “truzo packing” is not going to bring you lots of traffic, maybe you can also consider adding more keywords.
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