Long Tail Keywords: A Powerful SEO Strategy to Leverage

The main concern of every blogger, marketer and online retailer is to attract more visitors to the website. It is imperative to do what you can to drive traffic and get a better SEPR within the preview of acceptable white hat techniques. This is not an easy task. Millions of new websites are popping up every day, and established websites, which have grabbed most of the short-tail keywords, are spending more time and money to maintain their edge in the SEPRs. This puts small businesses in a tough position, and the only way they can stand up to big business and retailers is by being specific.

Leading SEO and eCommerce experts have been targeting specific or long-tail keywords for some time now, and it makes a lot of sense to do so. The idea is to use keywords/keyphrases that are more specific (ie targeting a defined group interested in the product or service being offered) and less competitive. Over the years, this strategy has produced positive results for a large number of small businesses.

Long tail keywords: what are they and why use them?

Keywords that are longer (3-5 words in length) and more specific can be called long-tail keywords. They are normally only used by a small group of websites, so they are less common and therefore easier to rank. This means that the chance of a long-term keyword ranking in the top three of SEPR is better than short keywords. A better ranking will lead to more traffic and this, in turn, will lead to more conversions and higher sales.

Here is an example to better illustrate the concept: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Now, imagine you are looking for a villa/cottage to spend your summer vacation in India. First start with the general keyword ‘holidays in India’. Millions of web pages of different holiday/holiday destinations in India are displayed on the screen (26, 10, 00, 000 results to be exact). Suddenly you remember that you want to go to Ooty, popularly called the Queen of Hill Stations, in the southern part of India. Change your search term to ‘Ooty Cottages’. This is a long term keyword. This term will give you specific results that are very close to your vacation plans (55,400 results). This is how long-tail keywords help: they reduce the time lag and increase the chances of finding the vacation home of your dreams.

How to create long-term keywords?

The first tool that comes to mind is Google Keyword Planner, but it’s just one of many methods. There are other ways to generate long-term keywords. Here are some popular techniques:

Google “Searches Related To” Section: You would have noticed a section titled “Searches Related To” at the bottom of the Google ranking page. This part of the page is a hidden treasure. Here you can collect ideas for long-term keywords. This part of the page contains terms closely related to the initial keyword used.

Discussion boards, forums, and comments sections: Boards and forums are great places to find questions that are on people’s minds. If a topic or question is increasingly being discussed or debated on these websites, you can be sure that the same questions or topics are being searched for on Google.

Google Trends: Before working on an SEO strategy and investing thousands of dollars in campaigns, it is wise to know if the popularity of the keywords you have chosen is going up or down. You can check the popularity of keywords with the help of Google Trends. This tool also provides “related terms” for your initial keywords.

Quora: Quora is a question and answer website, similar to forums, forums, or sites like Yahoo! answers The topics discussed here are very useful and most of the questions posted can easily be used as long-term keywords. Quora is a resource that all marketers should take full advantage of.

Other tools that can be used are Keywordtool.io, Google Correlate, Google Webmaster Tools, ScrapeBox (Keyword Scrape feature), UberSuggest (Google Suggest Scraper), Soovle.com, and the SEO Search Term Tagging plugin.