Targeting long tail keywords on your blog
Forget targeting individual keywords. That’s right. They matter little if you are serious about getting traffic to your blog from search engines.
For a business website that received 15,000 visitors per month, 8,135 of the visitors (less than 20%) came from keywords that bring only 1 visitor per month. That means that 80% of visitors came from long-tail keywords. And that statistic is not by any means an isolated case.
What is a long-tail keyword you ask?
Long tail keywords are unpredictable search terms that people enter into search engines. They are long simply because all of the short terms are predictable.
For example, dog food is a short-tail keyword (or key phrase) because it is very predictable but dog food beans natural is a long-tail keyword and is not very predictable. I’m sure you can guess that not many Internet marketers are targeting the term dog food beans natural. So the fight over the ranking for that keyword is generally fairer. The site that just happens to have the words dog, food, beans and natural in high density (among other factors search engines consider) will get a good ranking for that keyword.
Long tail keyword hits for this blog
This blog is only about 15 days old but currently has about 120 daily visitors (that’s good marketing if you ask me 8-)). Believe it or not, the primary source of traffic is not from the dozens of guest blog posts I’ve written that link back to my blog or the pages that rank well for logical search terms like “random topic generator” (which is currently the keyword that brings in the most traffic).
Believe it or not, the best performing keywords are ones that I didn’t even know existed. The ones that bring in a visitor once and never bring in a visitor again. Keywords like: “build a web site five pages free opt in form log in form retrive email address.” Yes, I kid you not! That was a search term that brought me a visitor yesterday.
Take a look at some of the other keywords that are bringing traffic to my site:
Do you really think I targeted the keywords: “best blog sites blogspot typepad” or “does firebugs allows you to modify the html document permanently” or “open popular blogging sites”?
I certainly could have targeted those keywords if I wanted to. I could have put them in my headings and placed them in anchor text pointing to pages on my blog. But of course I didn’t! Before I looked at my traffic analytics, I did not value those keywords at all. That’s the point. Long-tail keywords account for significantly more traffic than short-tale keywords yet are never given any thought, primarily because they are unpredictable.
How can bloggers take advantage of long-tail keywords?
Because blog content is primarily text, bloggers who are serious about getting traffic to their blog from search engines should learn how to take advantage of long-tail keywords. Many SEOers believe that it is impossible to target long-tail keywords because of their unpredictability. I disagree. You can’t target long tail keywords but you can write content that is what I like to call long-tail keyword friendly.
Below I have listed some of the many ways you can optimize your blog posts for long-tail keywords. The list is a revised (and added to) version of Mark Nunney’s list which was more for general websites rather than blogs.
- Use synonyms rather than repeating the same word throughout your blog posts. This will boost your long-tail keyword rankings and probably not effect your short-tail keyword rankings very much. Search engines like Google place more emphasis on anchor text from links pointing to your blog posts than keyword density. Believe it.
- Writing normally (rather than for SEO) will naturally increase your chances of targeting long-tail keywords.
- Target clumps of keywords rather than individual keywords. This means that you should never have a primary keyword that is repeated more than 2 or 3 times (unless that conflicts with writing naturally).
- Write very long blog posts. The longer the posts, the more potential long-tail keywords you will target.
- Use tags and categories extensively to assure your long-tail keywords are closer and more inter-related
Why do long-tail keywords bring in so much more traffic?
Many times when people search for something on the Internet, they are looking for specifics. In fact, people search for specifics more often than they do non-specifics. That is the primary idea fueling Yahoo Answers. Bob doesn’t want to know “how to fix nissan altimas” but “how to fix light oil temperature sensor light on nissan altima 98 GXE.”
SEO specialist Bill Tancer put it this way: “If search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inche head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”
So which do you think is more important? The tail or the head?
Photo Credit: Danard Vinvente
Hello, Thanks so much for this wonderful writ up i have gained alot from this.
please, i have a little problem here. How do one add “click here to read more…” or “click here to continue reading…” or “read more” to a blog post like you did on this blog. i need it too on my web. please i will appreciate your assistance.
is there any special code for it? or plug in?
Hey Naira,
Glad you liked the post!
There is a pretty simple way to add a “Read More” link so that your frontpage will only display the text of a post up to the read more button. All you have to do is to click on the “Insert More” button (alt-shift-T)in your post editor. Alternatively, you can add “” in the HTML tab of your post.
Let me know if this answers your question.
I love the message and it is very timely, I instruct local real estate agents in blogging and posting listings to greatly increase the likelihood of high search engine placement, especially Google. Breaking down long tail keyword search phrases to them is…..difficult, your post will help as they will all be getting a link to your post today….thank you.
Hey Bob,
Yeah I’ve found myself in the same boat trying to explain it to others. It’s one of those simple concepts that’s very difficult to explain clearly and concisely, without confusing the person. It took me about 10 minutes to write this definition:
“Long tail keywords are unpredictable search terms that people enter into search engines. They are long simply because all of the short terms are predictable.”
Glad you liked the post!
When people start to use the internet, they first think that yahoo, msn or other big portal is the internet. If for some reasons they can’t access yahoo or aol they will say that internet is broken.
After some time they realise that the internet is a big thing and they start to search: “games”, “fitness”, “food”. After some time they realize that they can find almost everything, and they will search for “free games”, “poker games”, “health food”, “fitness exercices”.
Then they will start getting advanced as internet users and they finally go for longtail search.
How this affect us ? The number of internet users is growing, but they are entering to the begginer level, where they know that the yahoo or aol is the internet. But those who previously thought that are now moving to search the internet.
The longtail search users is some kind of ending levels on internet usage. People who previously used short term queries now are using longtial, and advanced internet users number is growing a lot. While for other categories the number remains the same because some are joining and others are going to the next level, for longtail the number will always grow.
I absolutely agree with you Chris.
May I add:
You should target keywords which have more than 2000 ‘broad’ searches per month AND which have less than 50,000-60,000 ‘phrase’ match results. (use the keyword you get from Google keyword tool and search for the keyword with quotation marks and look at the number of results).
Any keyword with searches below 2000 will not be profitable enough. And any keyword which has results in Google above 60000-70000 will be too tough.
MOST of the short tail keywords are gone now. They do not meet the above criteria. They went like 10 years ago. So you will have to concentrate on long tail keywords.
Great input Nabeel.
Have you heard that Google recently altered its algorithm to change the way sites are ranked for long-tail keywords?
http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054
Chris, could you please elaborate whether this changes the method that I suggested above?
Thanks,
Nabeel
I agree，Long tail keywords do improve ROI of my site, but I now need one good tool for keywords suggestion, who can give a good tool plz
Use the Google Keyword Tool. It is one of the best and it’s free:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
thank you, I use it everyday. But I just need another one to get more accurate data. Sometimes I find Google Keyword Tool is not so accurate.