Why Long Tail Keywords Are Your Friend

If you’re starting a new business, SEO can sometimes seem a bit like an impossible challenge. With so many companies already out there pouring thousands of pounds into ranking highly in search results, how are you supposed to compete?

It turns out that you usually don’t have to. Instead, you can take advantage of emerging trends in search engine queries to get ahead of the competition.

Basic Keyword Strategies

One of the problems a lot of companies have when they target short-tailed keywords (with just one or two words in the phrase) is that they end up getting a lot of traffic that isn’t going to convert. More people are reaching their site, but they’re not finding the products and services they need. Some business owners actually think that this is a good thing. After all, some of those people might turn into sales once they reach the website and see the product, right?

Well, it turns out that that is just a fantasy in the heads of many founders and CEOs. In reality, people just click the back button in frustration and begin looking for other services that can really help them.

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Another common mistake made by founders is using high volume keywords. Let’s say, for instance, you’ve set up an ecommerce store selling horror books. You might think that having horror books as a targeted keyword would be a good thing. But every month, hundreds of thousands of people search for “horror books” making it extremely competitive. There are already thousands of businesses out there trying to get business from people searching for that particular phrase, and you’re unlikely to be able to compete against them straight away. A much better approach, therefore, is to be more specific. For instance, you could target individual books or books by a particular author.

Finally, be careful targeting high search volume keywords, even if they’re not particularly competitive. Often you’ll find that you get a lot of traffic that simply isn’t interested in what you have for sale. For instance, suppose you’re a consultancy for financial services. You could target “banks” as your keyword, but think about how much irrelevant traffic you would get if you did this. You’d get all the people looking to switch banks and students wanting to learn about banks. It’s unlikely you’d actually attract any of your target audience – the banks themselves. A better keyword might be something like “financial services consulting.”

How Keyword Strategies Are Changing

If the internet never changed and search never evolved, new businesses would continue to find it hard to gain a foothold online. But thanks to improvements in technology and changes in the way that consumers are interacting with the internet, SEO still offers companies enormous opportunities.

There are two major trends businesses need to be aware of. The first is that consumers are increasingly using voice search to make queries. Rarely do people dictate a bunch of keywords to their devices: instead, they ask questions or use natural language to describe what they want. This is opening up all kinds of opportunities for businesses. Rather than just target specific keywords, companies can now target questions and long tailed phrases. Because there are so many of them, the competition for these phrases is relatively light.

The trends for particular keyword searches are actually going down, not up. Suppose, for instance, you’re a law firm. According to the data, searches for “law firm” continue to decline as people expect more from their devices and search engine companies. In the past, people were prepared to tolerate interacting robotically with computers. But today, perhaps because of changes in machine learning technology, that’s becoming rarer. People are using standard English to communicate with search engines and expect them to give them relevant answers quickly.

For small businesses, this is an opportunity. Think about the type of questions one of your potential customers might ask Google if they wanted to get in contact with your business. Then create content and a keyword strategy around these phrases. Right now, search engines still struggle with the meaning of words, so you’ll need a lot of different permutations of the same basic question in your website to be effective. But with the right content strategy, you should be able to pull this off.

The great thing about long-tailed keywords is that there is much less competition. What’s more, they are an untapped resource: short tail keywords might be the most common, but there are often more long-tailed keyword searches in total. This makes them very attractive for businesses.