Long Tail keywords are search terms used by only one or two users. The graph above shows the number of visitors to our site per keyword over the course of the month. As you can see we get 20 times more traffic on keywords used by only one user. Our top 20 keywords supply just 10% of our traffic. The other 90% comes from the long tail. Below is an example of what short tail keywords look like;
| creative development | 27 |
| best e-commerce lightbox gallery | 26 |
| product developers sydney | 22 |
| web design sydney | 17 |
| old spice commercial | 15 |
And here is a list of long tail keywords
| web development recruitment agencies sydney | 1 |
| web development agency | 1 |
| web developers sydney | 1 |
| web developer agency sydney careers | 1 |
| web develop marketing | 1 |
| web develop cafe | 1 |
What are long tail keywords
You can see that long tail keywords are typically words you would not normally use, or optimise for. They might include keywords that are misspelled, or in a strange order. Most of our long tail keyword phrases are 5 words or longer.
Who uses long tail keywords, why are they good?
People type in strange and long combinations of keywords when they know what they are looking for. These are people that are doing research for something they know they need. As opposed to people searching for “marketing” or “web design” who could be anyone, long tail keyword users will be people who really need “magento ecommerce web design sydney”. This makes them very valuable, because you know the people using them are ready to buy.
What to do about long tail keywords
Here are three tips to increase your chances of snagging long tail keywords;
- Write original, quality, content. This goes without saying, however the more you write, the more likely you are to snag some of these keywords. Don’t keyword stuff, because there is a) the chance you might only optimise for one keyword, and miss out on all the long tail and b) you just get hit with a spam tag anyway.
- Use your meta tags well. Don’t keyword stuff them, because this will guarantee you will miss out on natural keyword usage. Make sure your title and description tags have natural language in them.
- Build links naturally. Having links anchored with a variety of keywords will improve your chances of being optimised for a range of subjects. Only anchoring with one keyword might make you number one for a popular word, but as you can see from the stats above, that would mean you miss out on a large portion of valuable users.