Long Tail Keywords SEO Term Definition
Long Tail Keywords is referring to search queries that have at least more than 3 keywords in them, but often times many more. For example, if someone searches for “car insurance”, this is not considered long tail because it’s a very broad search query. If someone searches for “car insurance for a pickup truck in el paso texas” that’s considered long tail because the person has really narrowed down what they are looking for.
Are Long Tail Keywords worth optimizing for?
Yes! Generally speaking long tail keywords are much more profitable than broad keywords because it’s easier to know the user’s intent. Someone searching for car insurance could be looking for the history of car insurance, the major car insurance companies, an explanation of what car insurance is or of course someone looking to buy car insurance.
On the other hand someone searching for “car insurance for a pickup truck in el paso texas” has clearly defined what he is looking for. It’s much easier to provide that person with what he’s looking for as well. If you’re selling insurance and cover pick up trucks in El Paso, Texas then this is a gold mine. You’d probably be willing to pay a lot more for this customer than someone who is searching for car insurance in general.
The long tail keywords are searched for much less and they’re generally less competitive however collectively there are a lot more long tail keywords than there are broad keywords.
How do you optimize for Long Tail Keywords?
If you’re optimizing for broad terms like “car insurance” you’re generally going to go through an on page checklist of image alt tags, h1 tags, h2 tags, bold text, etc and make sure the page is optimized for the term, then you’ll get a boat load of links to the page until you’re ranking. If that’s your SEO strategy it might work for the broad terms, but you can’t do that for 1000′s of individual small terms. The strategy for ranking for long tail involves doing proper on page SEO including website architecture, internal linking structure and having good strong authoritative seo copywriting that is relevant to the keywords.
Are Long Tail Keywords dying?
With features on Google like suggestive search and auto complete, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Google is pushing people away from long tail keyword search. The numbers are going down across the board, instead of people searching for long tail keywords Google and other search engines are trying to make their broad term keyword results tailored to individuals through social search, geo search and other factors. Someone searching for car insurance in Texas might see completely different results than someone searching for car insurance in UK.
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