Long tail keyword phrases
The role of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts is to guide web-based businesses on choosing proper keywords to boost traffic and ultimately sales. Basic SEO errors can harm the ranking of your website, constructed with great care and thought.
Seasoned professionals working in the highly competitive domain of online marketing know the importance of employing precise keywords for targeting potential customers who enter the buying cycle ‘late’.
The key is finding out:
- Which are these keywords?
- What are the ways and means of pinpointing them?
- Why are these keywords so important?
In professional terminology, what we are referring to here is the concept of targeting long tail keyword phrases. They are basically very, very specific 3 and 4-word phrases relevant to whoever and whatever you are selling.
Whenever customers put in or type in a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for precisely what they are actually looking to purchase. In almost every case, such specific searches are far more likely to convert to actual sales than those through general generic searches. The latter (searches) tend to be geared and designed more toward the type of research, which consumers typically conduct before arriving at a buying decision.
To help further illustrate this buyer mindset, let us consider a step-by-step buying path usually taken by any customer for making a purchase.
Step1: Consumer increases awareness of a product.
Step2: Consumer seeks detailed information about that particular product in preparation for prospective purchase.
Step3: Consumer evaluates various alternatives to the product under consideration in terms of features, pricing, and value-add, etc.
Step 4: Consumer makes the final purchase decision.
Step 5: Consumer completes the transaction.
Step 6: Consumer gives feedback on the product post-purchase and makes choice over retaining or returning it.
Employing the above six step, easy-to-follow path to a purchase process as our model, you may realize that you ideally want to target the consumer somewhere around the step 4 when he or she is about to make the purchase decision.
This stage is critical to catch customers because they start employing specific search phrases to seek the product once they have finalized their decision to purchase something.
Here is a practical example. Let’s consider your website sells guided heritage tours in Athens. Initially, you might think of targeting a generic key-phrase like travel. Logically speaking, a heritage tour is usually a kind of excursion history lovers like to undertake while traveling on vacation.
However, if you tried to opt for that phrase, you would be facing direct and stiff competition from big names like CNN.com, Travelocity.com and Yahoo.com. It is quite unlikely you would be able to beat any of these sites out of the top 10 unless you are prepared to pump in a huge amount of money and time.
More importantly, travel is not really the best phrase for you to target or highlight anyway, since many people who search using that phrase are likely to look for particulars such as ocean cruises, plane tickets or just conducting general research on which place they might like to visit. They are probably not telling themselves, “”I am looking for someone who sells guided tours for heritage lovers to walk around Athens’s historic places so I can take my children on an educational trip during this vacation.” If they were, they’d be entering some other phrase than travel.
Even if you were looking to target a more specific phrase like heritage tour you’d still be up against heavyweights like About.com and Wikipedia.org, so unless you sell everything related to heritage tours relevant to every heritage site across the globe, the traffic you would draw for that keyword isn’t likely to be converted into many fruitful sales. Now, let us consider some of the keywords, which are specific to what you intend to sell; keywords, which you can start ranking for and generating traffic and sales right away.
Here are a few highly specific key-phrases, which relate to customers who arrive much later in the buying cycle, say at step 3, and maybe even at step 4 and possibly step 5:
- Athens heritage guided touring
- Beginner heritage guided touring in Athens
- Guided heritage tours
- Heritage lovers package tours
Of course, these are mere illustrative examples. We are sure you can easily think of many more such practical examples. The point we are making here is twofold:
Point1: The long tail keywords, to reemphasize, are far easier to rank for.
Point 2: Individuals who search by employing long tail keywords are far more likely to become buyers!
More of the good news…
Of course, this indicates that you should be creating pages, which zero-in on snagging searchers who employ long tail keywords. And, since there happen to be potentially so many diverse long tail combinations that searchers may employ for buying what you offer, that means you will end up creating more pages. Well the good part is that Google likes and favors websites, which have more pages. It makes the website look more substantial and more comprehensive in the eyes of the world’s topmost search engine. Bear in mind the fact that your ‘unique’ pages need only be slight variants of your main offering/s, albeit focused on a specific long tail niche.
In other words, each and every page should have a unique title, h1 header tag, description Meta tag and body content, which emphasizes your product offering by making use of the long tail keyword that you select for each specific page. It works well to snag consumers at the critical stage of the buying process!
However, the downside of focusing too much on the long tail is, you might not draw enough traffic to sustain your business, if you target phrases are too specific. That’s why it makes sense to have a few pages assuring you large amount of less-targeted traffic, and a large number of pages, each sending you small amount of highly targeted traffic.
To sum up, we consider two key points:
First, a common SEO mistake: A common SEO mistake often made is to cram too many keywords in the copy, thinking that the website will get ranked higher in the search results. On the contrary, too many keywords could well cause the search engine to penalize your site, and result in a lower ranking on the search engine. Remember, adding too many keywords in the title – a common mistake that the SEO makes - is simply a wastage of time and efforts. To make it worse, it looks like a spam.
Secondly, a crucial SEO strategy: Highly specific and focused multi-word phrases tend to be far effective in getting ranked higher than the more generic single or double keyword phrases. It has been established that the long tail keywords are far easier to rank for. Individuals who search by employing long tail keywords are more likely to bring in sales!
There is no substitute for doing a rigorous keyword research and determining which of them will generate enough traffic to make them worth picking. This research must be dovetailed with your competitive intelligence research for working out the keywords that you will be able to rank for based on the websites you would most likely compete with.
Wordtracker is the hands-down best platform for finding a vast list of related keywords and also learning how much traffic each of them is likely to generate. For many of the websites managed by us, nearly half of our customer traffic is derived from these longer and more specific phrases. Importantly, such focused traffic tends to convert at a much higher level than just generic 1 or 2-word keyword phrases.
So, now you posses the tools it takes to assure:
- Easier and certain rankings boost
- Higher sales conversions
- Many more pages indexed in top search engine like Google
All of the above will definitely result in a much more profitable and healthier bottom line!
Tags: keyword phrases, long tail keywords, Search Engine Marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
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