Long
Tail Keywords: Worth the Effort?
As often happens in our SEO Chat forums, a number of our members
came in on various sides of a question. This one concerned long
tail keywords. We all know that these are supposed to be better
for conversions than their shorter, more competitive counterparts,
but that didn't match the experience (and site stats) of one of
our forum members at all. So he had to ask: are they really important,
or just hype?
The final answer: it depends. Some posters questioned, if not the
entire idea of long tail keywords, at least what should be considered
as such. Is “car insurance” a long tail keyword, since “insurance”
is the short version? What about “car insurance orlando florida”?
Forum gadfly fathom did the math, pointing out just how many different
variations you can get and how many potential conversions.
Other forum members observed that, if you're targeting more competitive
key phrases, of course most of your traffic will come from those.
In that case, your long tail traffic will be a bonus rather than
your chief source of income. After all, if you can get traffic for
“event planning,” you should be able to get traffic for “event planning
and preparation,” right?
Possibly...but the problem is, just how do you aim for those long
tail keywords? Going for the location helps, but, to paraphrase
Google's Udi Manber, what do you do when up to a quarter of the
queries the search engine sees on a single day are queries it has
never seen before? Can you use the same strategy if you're going
for long tail keywords as you would when you're trying to score
with the more competitive ones? And are there times when you should
try for one or the other but not both?
As you'd expect, there wasn't exactly a consensus. A number of
members suggested, however, that if you've built a new web site
that's trying to work its way into a competitive space, you should
probably try to go for long tail keywords and “bootstrap” yourself
up, hoping the sales you get from those will help you grow.
This leaves the question of strategy and exactly how you do this.
Long tail keywords are not searched for often (remember that figure
from Manber) so how do you know what to target? You might not. If
you're going for the long tail, you want lots of different variations
on key phrases. That means lots of content. It should be good content,
of course, but still, you're looking at a lot of writing. If you
decide to go after the competitive phrases, on the other hand, you
probably need to think more about link building and link bait. As
one forum member put it, “You won't get anything from traditional
keyword targeting if you don't have the link weight to back you
up.”
So, if you're better at writing content, you're in a good position
to get traffic from the long tail. If you're better at link building,
you might want to make a play for the more competitive keywords.
And “If you can manage both,” observed forum member Joshua Watson,
“well...then it's a moot issue, is it not?” Good luck!
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