LONG TAIL KEYWORDS USUALLY DRIVE MOST OF THE ORGANIC SEARCH OF A SITE.
So, forget for a while the SEO-ego of ranking for a certain word very high. It will take you a lot of time and there are small chances that you will have soon a top position in Google for that.
WHAT IS LONG TAIL IN SEO?
Long tail means at least 3 words phrases that have:
* low search volume in search engines
* low competition
As you can see below, my (long) tail describes a graphic, that shows you the idea behind long tail and short tail.
Short tail searches are in the left side. there is huge competition here, everybody wants “bananas”, everybody’s searching it, few are getting. I was lucky to get on top of the tree, but it took me a while. You can strive a lot to get on the tree top, but other monkeys, more eager to eat fresh fruit, may block you, so you may relieve hunger by eating some nice and varied vegetables down there
As you see, the amount of searches in the left (generated by short keywords) is the same with the one in the right side (generated by long tail phrases), in other words, more diversified food from the jungle ground will feed you too. If you are looking only for bananas, you may be very hungry at the end of the day, or month )
You have to train a little in the jungle to reach the top of the tree someday. If you’ll write a lot about stuff you like, you have real chances to rank high for long tail keywords. And after some time of good writing, you may hit the big ones, short tail.
> You need a strong base on your website and that is given by traffic from different sources / many keywords. If Google makes an important update and your traffic is based on a few top keywords, chances that your traffic will dramatically drop are high. With long tail, you always win. It’s just as in a company, it is nice to have a few big clients, but the base is more important: the small and medium clients, that are more numerous and they give your firm stability. You just cannot depend on the big ones.
BETTER CONVERSIONS FOR LONG TAIL KEYWORDS / PHRASES
Longer searches tend to generate more sales as people search for specific stuff they want. Monkey reads from while to while Rand Fishkin’s post and according to this Moz study , 70% of the traffic comes from long searches.
You can stand out without spending a lot of time in positioning high for very competitive words. SEOMonkey likes diversity and my fellow monkeys too. Everyone’s unique, we tend to search for very different words. Remember, there should be enough room for all the monkeys in this world. If they all wanted the same thing and searched for it, only few would be happy, the ones getting the bananas
No room for all the monkeys in the banana tree. Your time will come, lil’ monkey ) eat your leaves for the moment!
Ok, too much monkey talk. Let’s get to business. Long tail. long tail, but how am I gonna grow one?
It’s always nice to inform a little before getting to work. On my first SEO project that I considered a huge success, I made a terrible mistake. It took me almost a year to be on the 1st position for a certain keyword. I did not know about long tail at that time. I was damn blind, I just wanted to be number one 😀 The problem was that it did not bring as much traffic as I wanted. My mistake: I did not make keyword research. I just assumed what word would be best to rank for.
FREE KEYWORD TOOLS FOR LONG TAIL KEYWORDS RESEARCH
ALMIGHTY GOOGLE
Hit search for a specific word in Google, for instance “bananas”
Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see something like this:
Well, Google gives you already lots of suggestions related to your keyword. You can dive deeper. Let’s take “wild bananas”, as I like eco food
Copy “wild banana” in Google search box and give it a hit Again, you’ll find some new, even more specific suggestions:
Yet so simple, but so effective.
Specialized forums are a great resource for finding long tail keywords, also. Do this:
You will get lots of results from forums talking ’bout my favorite fruit.
Let’s take the first one: we have lots of hints in the forum categories already (I picked the first one: http://www.bananas.org/) : cold hardy bananas, ornamental bananas, Propagation Techniques of Banana Plants, Banana Seed Germination and so on. Endless keyword suggestion resources, for free.
Open this great tool in your browser – monkey is already fed up with bananas, so I choose “jungle”.
The interesting side of this tool is that it takes the results from Google Suggest and forces more results by adding a letter. Instead of you writing to Google “jungle a”, you simply use this tool and you get 10 suggestions for each extra letter.
Even more, you can take the phrases Ubersuggest gives you and go to Google Keyword Planner (you must have a Google Adwords account – I’m sure you have, even me the monkey has one ). You will get:
* keyword ideas
* search volume trends
* average monthly searches
* competition ratings
I always tell myself Google Console, Google Console just to remember this one, but the old name keeps coming into my old-monkey brain
It’s a must to have your site added to Webmaster Tools. It gives you data about all the traffic coming from organic search (usually with a latency of 2 days). You may find our that you have a huge potential with phrases you had no idea you ranked for.
My colleagues tend to look only at the keywords that rank us on the first Google page, but me, even though I’m such an ADHD ape, I like finding out crazy searches where we rank on the 3rd or 4th page. Human minds are crazyyyyyyyyyy! It never knows what idea may come to your head by doing so. You may be writing a best seller tomorrow related to a hilarious search found on the 10th page
Goooooood, I love this tool.
I’m not sure what to write about next week, so I compare jungle with bananas.
Now I know. Jungle seems more tempting it has bananas in it, lots of them, but also other cool stuff. I always check the “Forecast” box on the top right and I have an idea if my jungle-related article would be of interest in 6 months time. Is seems so.
After this lovely graph, you’ll see the regions and cities where the interest is the highest for bananas and jungle And, let’s not forget why we are here: to find some good long tail keyword suggestions. We have them at the bottom of the page:
On the left side > the most discussed topics. On the right > top queries.
If you hit “Rising” instead of “Top”, you’ll see what’s really trendy right now:
As the link says (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/), this tool is part of Google Trends.
You’ll find out the correlation degree between your word(s) and the suggested related ones.
Wow Most of the guys eating bananas are interested in working out, lifting weights and losing weight. Good to know.
Even though I did not expect to find Jesus here, Quora is a great Q&A site that can help you a lot with keyword hints.
This tool gives you related keyword searches from Google, Youtube, Bing and App Store. And their lists are just huuuuuuge.
Have you noticed? I did not search for “jungle” this time – I would have been lost in their list anyway 😀
That’s it for today. There are lots of other nice tools out there in the SEOjungle, but these are the ones I use in my daily work.
Until next time, don’t forget to keep it simple.