The Power of Long Tail Keywords

If you haven’t heard of the “long tail” phrase, it was made famous by a book written by Chris Anderson. The long tail refers to the statistical graph where the line is skewed to the right without ever reaching zero on the horizontal scale. Essentially, it’s an infinite line.

In Anderson’s book, he explains how the Internet is circumventing every aspect of consumer choice. Before the Internet, consumers didn’t have much choice. We simply took what the media and retailers presented and gave up on our own “custom” desires.

Taking the book into account, lets look at how using long tail keywords and phrases applies to effective search engine rankings and placements.

Effective Use of Long Tail Keywords

Let’s look at an example of what it means to use long tail keywords. If you’re selling boots, an obvious keyword that you might want to target is “boots”. Now, if you’re a small boot seller, you probably won’t have the time or money it would take to get in the top 10 search results for the term “boots”.

But, let’s say that you sell a highly specialized type of boot. Maybe you sell boots for people who have had leg, knee or foot injuries. Or, maybe you make custom boots for soldiers or cowboys. I know of several people who only buy custom boots so it’s not unheard of.

Rather than trying to hit a highly competitive keyword like boots, you would want to go after a phrase like “custom cowboy boots” or “boots for foot injuries”.

You might be thinking that there’s not enough traffic for these terms to bring you any kind of sales. However that’s exactly how the long tail process works. You don’t want a lot of traffic from a single keyword phrase. You want a little traffic from a bunch of smaller, less searched keywords.

Let’s say one of your keywords brings 100 website visitors per month. Let’s also say that you have a great website, with great copy, and you’re able to convert 5% of your visitors. So, five people will buy per 100 visitors.

Now, let’s say you have 10 of those long tail keywords. Each one of those keywords brings in 100 visitors per month. So, now you have 1,000 visitors per month reaching your website. If we leave the same conversion rate, 5%, then these 10 keywords will net you 50 sales per month.

Target Lots of Small Traffic Keywords

So, your goal as a long tail marketer is to snap up as much as the “little” traffic that you can get. You’re not trying to compete with big-box retailers or websites. There’s traffic that large websites don’t get because they don’t sell what people are looking for. That becomes your job.

There are people who are looking for all kinds of niche products and information. It’s your job to look at what you have to offer and to think beyond the obvious keyword terms. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of keyword niches that very few people are competing for.

Mining for Keywords

You can use this handy little free tool from ahrefs to find long tail keywords as well as search stats: https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator

As you can see, combining effective use of long tail keyword phrases with a solid converting website can help you tap into previously untouched markets, unfilled needs, and diversify into thousands of niche areas. Not only do we offer many niche websites, they are easy to configure the long tail keywords of your choice.