Long tail SEO (a.k.a long tail keywords) is a white hat SEO process that involves targeting less competitive, highly specific search terms.
Seeing that over 70% of all search queries are for these long tail key phrases, there can be incredible value in having great visibility for the phrases that are relevant to your business model.
Targeting long tail keyword phrases in your SEO strategy can be an incredibly powerful technique for building up ones organic search engine traffic. Research suggests that long tail keywords are easier to rank for, bring in more combined traffic, and convert more visitors to customers than the more popular “generic” keywords.
Learn more about the power of long tail keywords SEO strategies in the infographic below created by the folks at HitTail.
[Click here for full size version]
Mark @ ThinkTraffic
Great advice David (nice image too).
I am telling all of my clients this same thing right now, by focusing on long tail you can come up with many more interesting content ideas and cast a wider net…
The funny thing is; many clients find that when we focus on the long tail they end up getting better rankings for the head-terms too. So it’s wins all round.
One of the hardest things about long-tail SEO is determining the cutoff point where the effort outweighs the benefit. Some terms, no matter how relevant, will never be worth a concentrated effort. Determining that point can be hard for SMBs.
Jason Acidre put it really well over on his recent post http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/ that “advanced [SEO] is just being really good with the basics”. And I couldnt agree more, investing time in harvesting long tail keywords is relatively speaking, as old as the hill and STILL worth the time and effort.
Sebastian Audet
Both good and bad (as with any tech).
Great from the consumer’s standpoint that it means I get more relevant results to my queries.
Bad, because it means I have to spend even more time wresting control from idiotic SEOs.
I invite thought that the *reason* so called ‘long-tail’ is 70% of the search market is that consumers realized quickly a long time ago that single word searches were just about utterly corrupt (on popular search engines).
In summary, Search Engine, tool for the consumer, SEO, tool to destroy the consumer’s tool.
Keyword “A” has 200 searches and keyword “B” get 100 searches when separated giving you 300 search total results. By combining these two (or more for long tail keywords) together gives you 75 search results would you also get search results for the individual words?
When you use a long tail keyword are you nullifying the benefit of those keywords by combining them as opposed to having them apart.
Thanks