Long-Tail Keywords

Long-Tail Keywords and why ignoring them could be your business’s biggest mistake

This may go against everything you think you know about search on the internet, but long-tail keywords may be just as important as those coveted short keywords. Think about it for a second. When you look up something like “car buying” are you looking for information or are you looking to buy a car? If you are like most searchers out there, then this type of keyword is what you search when you are in the research stage. If a searcher looks for “2006 Honda Civic for sale,” it is obvious that this consumer knows what he or she wants and is ready to buy. Depending upon which search engine the consumer is using, they may even search for a very long search term such as “2006 Honda Civic for sale in Gilbert Arizona.” When consumers are willing to type this much information into the search bar, they are serious about what they are doing. In this example, if you are a dealership trying to sell cars, you better have an internet marketing plan that goes after these long-tail keywords. If you don’t, then you need a new plan because you are losing out on motivated and ready buyers.

Valuable Traffic

Getting back to the topic at hand, the long tail keyword isn’t only valuable because the traffic it delivers converts at a higher rate than a short one, but it is valuable because it is usually easy to rank for. There may be other smart businesses who have seen this opportunity and started to rank for these long tail keywords, but even then this competition will be much less than when trying to rank for a short keyword. Now that you see the value of a long-tail keyword, we’re going to point out something that should be common sense to everyone: this better be a great keyword. You can rank easily for long-tail keywords, but who cares if you’re number one for “the greatest 2006 Honda Civic the world has ever known for sale in Gilbert Arizona.” This is an extreme example, but it shows our point that like any other keyword, you need to do your research to find out what type of long tail keywords you should be targeting. This isn’t just for small business either. Big business should stop and take note because they may just be losing out on a part of their internet market that will provide an extremely high ROI and isn’t that what every business is looking for?

Making it Easy to Rank

The best and easiest way to rank for long-tail keywords is via a blog. While you could create thousands of pages on your site, each one going after a specific long tail keyword, but the process simply isn’t feasible. There is no way to know every single long tail keyword you should be targeting because their are tens of thousands of them and that’s likely an underestimation. A blog solves that problem because in the actual posts will be a wide number of long tail keywords that are inadvertently placed in there.

Using Blogs to Make you Money

Search engines like Google will also take multiple, disconnected parts of a blog post and stitch them together in the actual search results. For example, a user might search something like “cheap oil change for 06 honda civic gilbert” – a search term that is likely not searched more than once per year but will convert 100% of the time. But if you have parts of that search keyword in the blog post than there’s a good chance you’ll rank for the term right away. For example, your blog post might have a portion discussing the Honda Civic, comparisons of different years of the Civic, a quick mention of changing the oil on a Civic, and you’re location – in Gilbert. Not only will you show up for the term “cheap oil change for 06 honda civic gilbert” but it’s likely you’ll show up for a multitude of similar, high ROI terms. All of that with one blog post.