Why long tail
In modern SEO, long tail keywords are the most important and fundamental element to build your content marketing strategy. As a business you are selling some kind of product or service, and you need the right kind of traffic to come to your site.
Traffic that buys your stuff. And long tail keywords do exactly that same thing. Long tail keywords drive highly targeted traffic to your site that is looking for whatever you are selling.
Google Hummingbird and Long tail keywords
You might already know, that ever since the hummingbird update to Google’s search engine (that happened sometime back in 2013-14), long tail keywords have gained supreme dominance when it comes to selecting keywords.
With hummingbird, Google search now heavily determines the “intent” of the search and shows results accordingly. For example if someone searches for “pizzas” google will assume that the user is looking for a pizza and will show restaurants and shops nearby the user in the search result.
So Google will not show pages that tell what a pizza is or how to make one. Google will also tailor the results heavily based on the location.
This brings great opportunities for SEO, as now google recognizes the “intent” of long tail keywords better than before, making it easier for sites to rank for proper long tail keywords with proper content.
In this post we take a look at the most important 3 reasons why you should pursue a “long tail strategy” in your content marketing efforts to maximize returns.
1. Higher search intent – targeted traffic
What is search intent ? It is the intention of the person to find what he is looking for. Of course every seeker has a real intent every time he or she searches for something, but the level of intent differs.
Long tail vs Short tail
“make ice cream” – The user is probably interested in learning how to make an ice cream, or looking for a particular ice cream recipe or something similar.
“make eggless ice cream at home” – The user is looking for something very specific. Very high level intent.
Take another example
“bluetooth headphone” – The user wants to know what a bluetooth headphone is ? Or is he looking to buy a bluetooth headphone ? Or is he looking for some technical information about bluetooth headphones ?
The intent is not very clear.
“bluetooth headset for iphone 6” – The user is actually looking to buy a bluetooth headset for his iphone 6. This is a very specific query.
The level of detail specified by a user in long tail keyword is much higher, which makes these keywords ideal for targeting for a specific purpose, which is mostly selling stuff.
So if you want to sell headphones on your website, try targeting the long tail version of the keyword shown above.
2. Lower serp competition – easier to rank!
Like already mentioned above, since the hummingbird update, Google pays special attention to long tail search phrases and shows results accordingly. This means that for long tail keywords Google considers those pages better that target the long tail keyword specifically.
This narrows down the competition, since long tail keywords have lower competitions compared to the more generic short tail keywords. This makes it easier to rank for such keywords and get traffic faster and with less effort.
3. Opportunity to build more content – better SEO
Since long tail keywords bring in a lot of variety, they can be used to build more content. Start writing a new post for each different long tail keyword.
Each page has a different page title, a different meta description and unique content. Google likes that. You are not only making Google happy with your site, but also producing value for your readers.
More content means more SEO and a stronger and better site. Since you would be driving traffic from a larger set of keywords, the overall site traffic would be able to sustain for a longer time when competition comes up.