Value of Long Tail Keywords

The value of long tail keywords is sometimes overlooked by marketers that are just getting started with SEO. It is natural to want to go after highly sought after terms, but it is often unrealistic for new sites to rank well for those keywords. With more companies getting into SEO & SEM, the value of less popular keywords will be on the rise.

If you're a small business or eCommerce site with a limited budget, the most profitable strategy is to go after keywords in the "long tail" which convert at a much higher rate than the generic two word combinations that may bring a lot of visitors to your site, but very few customers. Go after these competitive terms after you have demonstrated success ranking for the long tail keywords.

Not all traffic is equal

What's better, making 2 or 3 sales from 1,000 visitors who found your website searching on the term "car insurance", or 20 sales from 40 visitors who searched for "car insurance quote Brooklyn, New York"? The answer depends on if you are monetizing your site with advertising or if you are an eCommerce site looking for more sales online.

Visitors that come to your site, leave, and never come back are not as valuable as a few qualified visitors that make (repeat) purchases on your site

Don't be fooled by estimates that show these long tail phrases with very low search volumes. When it comes to making money online, you need to know which types of phrases will lead to conversions and sales, not just traffic to your site.

Long tail keyword searches are conducted by people who are often ready to make a purchase

Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide, has written extensively about the Search Buying Cycle.

Here are some examples of phrases that show the difference between research and intent to purchase:

Research:"High definition TVs"
Intent to purchase:"Sony Bravia 52 inch HDTV price"

Research:"luxury apartments"
Intent to purchase:"Chicago 1 bedroom luxury apartment"

Using HitTail along with blogging software is a great way to get started going after the long tail. HitTail doesn't show you generic terms that everyone in your industry will compete for. It's suggesting terms that you know your site has the ability to rank for if you deliberately target them. It saves you time that would have been spent on keyword research and allows you to focus that time on writing.

Don't have the time to write about long tail topics? Try using a ghost article writing service like Content Spooling Network.

If you think it's inefficient to go after these terms one by one, then consider an automated approach to take advantage of the long tail based on your existing content/database assets. This system will create highly targeted search-friendly pages that can be justified from an editorial standpoint. Contact Connors for more information about our enterprise SEO and strategic writing services.

Long Tail Keyword

At yesterday's SEO Super Power Meetup, one of the original beta testers simultaneously praised us for how well HitTail worked, and challenged me on why it works, and why he should trust the suggestions.

The answer needs to be qualified: don't take HitTail suggestions blindly! They have to make sense in the context of your site. But they pretty much always do work. In other words, if you take a suggestion issued by HitTail and put it into the Title field of a new blog post, you're pretty much assured to grab the first page on that term, and generate new qualified traffic.

And it takes something of a leap of faith to understand why--and how we're able to do this at such a low-cost and in real time. We understand that there are other products that give you thousands, or tens-of-thousands of keywords at a single go. But they're much more expensive, and such long lists are mostly suitable for pay-per-click campaigns. But as far as getting writing ideas, lists like that just aren't as good as HitTail.

Why?

A suggestion issued by HitTail means that someone JUST found you on that term, but not on the first couple of pages of results.

So, what does this tell you?

1. You CAN be found on this term.
2. There is at least SOME traffic there.
3. There's a bunch of results ahead of you on that term which for some reason didn't satisfy the searcher.

And these three truths make a HitTail suggestion the best sort of long tail keyword. It's active. You're already associated with it. And sites higher in the results are not satisfying users.

BAM! You have the top position on that term.

It might only amount to 50 visits on that term in the course of an entire year. But that's 50 visits you would probably not have gotten otherwise. And it's traffic on fairly specific, and therefore, uniquely pre-qualified potential customers (prospects).

And of course, if you keep this up over time with many HitTail suggestions, the effect accumulates, and results in compounding returns. The idea is that you're going for complete dominance in your particular market niche, following the most logical, and immediately rewarding path, from a quality-content-expansion point-of-view.

Spread the word!