Long Tail Keywords

It is all too often that we speak with a business owner looking to create a presence on the web who has unrealistic goals.  It’s very common for requests to be made to target extremely competitive, short tail keyword phrases.  For example, we spoke with an attorney the other day who wanted to create a web presence and rank for the term “DUI Attorney”.    There are over 4 million competing sites for that exact match phrase.  A brand new site has no chance to compete.  What’s more, ranking for the general term is not likely going to do much good.  If our attorney only practices in California, ranking for such a general term may seem like a great goal, but the phrase simply does not target the audience properly.

Instead of choosing these highly competitive general terms, we suggest considering what are called long tail keywords.  These can be the same keywords as the high competition phrases, but with added modifiers.  So in our example, instead of targeting “DUI Attorney”, we target “Alameda DUI Attorney”, which has much lower competition, and which will provide highly targeted traffic to the site (assuming our attorney is located or does business in Alameda).

These long tail keywords are overlooked all too often.  When choosing keywords, be sure not to get caught up in the search volume alone.  A phrase with a large amount of search volume may look great on paper, but if it is going to take you a long time and/or a lot of money to rank for that phrase, you want to make sure that the traffic it brings will be targeted so you can convert visitors to clients.  An example of this would be targeting the very general, very competitive keyword “Attorney”.  Now that is ambitious, and the search volume is high, but if you are a DUI attorney operating only in part of California, your conversions for this general term “Attorney” are going to be incredibly small.

In addition to being more targeted, the long tail keywords are going to have lower competition.  In the time it would take you to rank on the first page for “DUI Attorney” (if you ever ranked on page one for that term), you could rank for numerous long tail keywords.  If the more general keyword term will convert for you, there is still a benefit to working on long tail keywords.  The benefit is the traffic and how long it takes to start getting it to your site.

Using our example above again, let’s say our attorney can take cases from all over the country.  If he has a new site with little or no rankings and authority, it is going to take a while to be competitive and rank for this general term.  During this time, by adding long tail keywords to your marketing strategy you can begin to see traffic sooner.  You will rank more quickly for these terms.  In addition, the more targeted they are, the higher your conversions should be.  So using these lower competition phrases can give you converting traffic while you are waiting for the more competitive keywords to rank well enough to generate traffic.

Even if the general keyword phrase can fit your business, you should consider the long tail keyword.  You can target many long tail keywords and continue adding them to keep increasing the traffic to your site.  This traffic will be much more targeted than the general traffic, bringing higher conversions.  The competition for the long tail keywords will be less, so the cost and/or time required to rank well will be lower, and you can create a nearly endless supply of long tail keywords, so you can always continue building more highly targeted and converting traffic.  If you are not targeting long tail keywords, now is the time to start!

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