Long-Tail Keywords: A Complete Know-How Guide

Long-Tail Keywords

Keywords play a crucial role in search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO makes use of multiple types of keywords to enhance the visibility of a website and boost its rankings. There are different types of keywords utilised by SEO experts such as seed keywords, primary keywords, secondary keywords, long-tail keywords, navigational, transactional, commercial, informational, branded keywords, unbranded keywords and local-search keywords.

It completely depends on the business or a website as to what kind of keywords need to be focused upon for optimisation. In this article, we will discuss long-tail keywords and how these work on search engines and how they can help you bring valuable organic traffic to your website.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords comprise phrases in comparison to the traditional exact-match keywords. They are longer and more specific. These keywords are made from three or more phrases and have lower search volumes. Long-phrase keywords are also deemed to be less competitive.

Although long-tail keywords have low search volumes, they can help in attracting more organic traffic to your website. Additionally, these keywords also help to bring relevant traffic to your webpage rather than attracting irrelevant users.

Say, for instance, a user wants to buy a ‘blue toy car’ for their child. If the user types ‘toy’ as a search query, the search engine will list page results having the keyword ‘toy’ in them irrespective of whether it has a blue car toy or not. When such users come to your website, and your website is not having what they are looking for, they become irrelevant users, who end up increasing bounce rates.

If the user now types ‘blue toy car’ as a search query, the search engine will list results having this keyword, and this user becomes a relevant user and a potential customer. This can only happen if you have described your product or services on a webpage correctly to match the long-tail keyword phrases.

What Is Long-Tail Keyword Structure?

Long-tail keyword structure is generally made from three to five words and is targeted towards finding exactly what the user is looking for. For instance, a cap’ will not give suitable results to a user if the user is looking for a ‘red cap for men’ or a ‘red cap for women’. The latter ones are long-tail keywords that will lead the user to a more relevant website.

The structure of a long-tail keyword consists of the seed keyword (‘cap’ is the seed keyword in the above instance) along with descriptive questions such as what colour cap, the size of the cap or is the cap for kids or adults and more such descriptive to be able to let the search engine know what exactly to look for to display as search results.

How To Identify Long-Tail Keywords?

Identifying long-tail keywords is the best way to attract relevant organic traffic to your website which can help to convert the users to potential customers. Below are some steps to help you identify long-tail keywords:

1. Identify the seed keyword that you want your page to rank for. For instance, your webpage has men’s shirts available in various colours and sizes. The seed keyword here will be ‘shirts’

2. Do some competitive research and identify how your competitors are using keywords to bring relevant traffic to their websites and target similar keywords which have higher search volume comparatively.

3. Think about all the different ways a keyword can be used from the user’s perspective and target more relevant and high search volume keywords among those.

There are various ways of identifying the Long-phrase keywords you might use for your website. It also depends on the questions that relate to a particular seed keyword. The best way to go ahead would be to conduct thorough keyword research first and then identify the best suitable keywords for your website.

Long-Tail Keyword Research

Carrying out long-tail keyword research is a crucial step to help you identify the correct and potential keywords that will help you rank and outperform your competitors. Refer below steps to help you conduct long-tail keyword research.

1. Identify the seed keywords that you are targeting for your website.

2. Go for competitors’ keyword analysis and see how they have been using the long-tail keywords.

3. List out all possible long-tail keywords using a keyword research tool.

4. Think about all possible questions a user might think of related to your seed keyword.

5. Use question keywords in your long-tail keyword research.

6. Try to consider the keywords that answer the what, why, when, how, and which questions.

7. Type the keywords in Google to see what results are listed for that long-tail phrase keyword. Use the keyword only if Google lists your desired results. You need to do this to understand the user’s perspective.

8. Avoid using negative keywords, even if your competitors have used those.

9. Finally, using a keyword research tool, look for the search volume of all the listed keywords and consider high-search volume keywords over low-search keywords.

10.Also, look for similar keywords in the research tool and if they have higher search volumes, use those too.

How To Use Long-Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are used to target more specific traffic for a particular search query. To use long-tail keywords, the best way is to start creating content based on the keywords that you have decided to target.

Use these keywords in the meta titles and meta descriptions to help the search engines understand what the content is all about. Additionally, make use of these Long-phrase keywords in content when you build backlinks and get links on these keywords from relevant third-party resources.

The only thing you need to know about is to learn how to use these long-tail keywords naturally in your content rather than just stuffing them anywhere at all. The flow of your content should not be interrupted when you use these keywords. Overusing keywords will end up making the content sound unnatural and will not help you rank on SERPs.

How Do Long-Tail Keywords Work?

Long-tail keywords work on more specific search-related keywords. Since these are less competitive than exact-match keywords, your chances of ranking for these keywords are more compared to exact-match.

Since long-tail keywords are more question-based or more descriptive, Google searches for results that are more relevant to those Long-phrase keywords and displays the keyword closest websites.

When one types a long-tail search query in Google, Google will look for results that contain all the phrases that have been typed as a search query and look for the websites that contain all the phrases, then look for relevancy based on Google’s ranking algorithms and then display the results.

Finding Qualified Long-Tail Keywords

When you decide to go with long-tail keywords, you will come across many phrases that can be used. It becomes necessary to understand and find out the qualified Long-phrase keywords to be able to generate the desired results.

Not all Long-phrase keywords are qualified keywords. You need to first list out all the potential combinations of keywords and then select those with high search volumes. Once you identify these, you also need to look for more similar keywords using a keyword research tool.

As a result, you will get a list of long-tail keywords with high search volumes, which can be considered qualified keywords.

How Does Google See Long-Tail Keywords?

To be Exact, Google sees long-tail keywords more as sentences and long phrases. The search results that Google displays for long-tail search queries are more specific.

Google also sees how the long-tail keyword is used in content. Suppose you have the long phrase keyword in your meta title and meta description, but not much in your content, Google is smart enough to pick this up.

Google even sees how naturally a long-phrase keyword is used throughout the content. The best way is to use the phrase more naturally in the entire content. It should not look stuffed or irrelevant.

Why Are Long-Tail Keywords Important For SEO?

Long-tail keywords are important for SEO because of the conversion value they have a high conversion rate. Traffic is important, but what if you have thousands of traffic and hardly any leads or conversions?

Here is where Long-phrase keywords play an important role in SEO to help direct the web page to targeted and potential customers, which are more likely to convert and bring more conversions.

Long-phrase keywords also help to attract niche customers, thus adding up to the organic traffic and improving the click-through rates. These long-phrase keywords also help to enhance the user experience which in turn helps to build user-website trust. This leads to low bounce rates, returning users and complete overall success for your business website.

How To Incorporate Long-Tail Keywords In Your Content?

When you are targeting long-tail keywords for your web page, it becomes necessary to incorporate these in your content to increase its chances of ranking on search engines.

When incorporating these long-phrase keywords, research topics that are similar to the keywords. This will help to make your content seem more natural with the used keywords.

Use all possible combinations of the keyword while writing the content. Make use of the keyword in the headings H1, H2, H3 and so on. Make sure to use your targeted keyword for optimising images used throughout the content.

When Not To Use Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords can be avoided when you are targeting a niche audience. As the target audience is limited, the more general and exact-match keywords will work here.

Even while creating evergreen content, long-phrase keywords are not required. Though these long keywords increase the chances of conversions, you do not need to use them in every place. It is important to identify first whether these will be beneficial for your requirement and whether are not they will add to the success of your business.

Benefits Of Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords help to reduce the bounce rate by attracting more relevant users to the website. They also help to improve the click-through rates and bring in more business and sales to the website. Help to increase repeat customers and obtain more rankings on search engines.

One of the major benefits of Long-phrase keywords is that they are less competitive and have more chances of ranking compared to generic keywords.

These keywords also help to provide more relevant results to the users and thus prove to be more from the user perspective.

Using Questions In Long-Tail Keywords

Adding questions to long-tail keywords is always beneficial. While searching for specific long-phrase queries, users tend to add questioning phrases like what, when, how, what, which, where and many more.

Adding such question phrases in the long-tail keywords will increase the chances of directing search engine queries to the web page.

Long-Tail Keywords Strategy With Reposition

We hope this article helped you to understand how Long-phrase keywords are and what are its potential. If you have a business website and finding it hard to understand how to use such long-phrase keywords to your benefit, contact Reposition to help you unleash the potential of these long-tail keywords for your business.

Improve your webpage visibility, and CTR and attract more relevant traffic with Long-phrase keywords.