What the Heck are Long Tail Keywords?

You hear people say "Long Tail Keywords" and you think to yourself, "what does that mean?!" "I just know that I want to rank well for my city real estate". The thing to remember is that you are likely targeting a couple of very competitive keywords. And your audience is broad. To get those people who are searching for something specific (and who are usually more likely to convert - be ready to talk to you now) you need to have content that can rank for those "long tail" searches.

The basic definition of a long tail keyword / key phrase / search is a keyword phrase that is extremely targeted to a specific niche so that it gets a small amount of extremely targeted traffic. The theory is that you can possibly get more overall traffic to your site by using a large amount of long tail keywords (all of the small traffic for each one being added together) than you can using a small amount of general keyword terms. Basically, long tail would be the dozens and dozens of keywords and keyword phrases that a website is found for, but are not considered a large focus of your marketing efforts.

Take for instance online book stores. These online stores carry large collections of books and want to be found when a searcher is looking for a specific author, a specific title, or even a general subject matter. By using long tails, most of these online book stores get more combined traffic for long tail keyword terms like "Sing Me a Ditty by Shamarie Jacobs" than they do for larger, more general terms like "buy book". Did you know that Amazon.com makes over 55% of their sales from traffic coming in to their site based on long tail keyword searches? Even Google has said that nearly 25% of the daily queries made on their search engine are for keyword terms that they have never seen before!

So what does this mean to you?

Although it is important that you continue to make efforts on the big traffic keyword terms in your area (i.e. Skylar Real Estate, Taylor Homes For Sale, etc.) you should also be considering how you can take terms such as those and make them into long tail contenders! For instance, "Skylar CA Real Estate Agent" or "Taylor California Homes for Sale or Rent" would be a good direction because they contain so may possibilities within them. Everything from "Skylar Real Estate Agent" to "Skylar CA Agent" to "Skylar real Estate" are all covered in one strategically written line! You also want to consider topical items such as "list of churches in Taylor CA" or "open houses in Skylar California".

So where do you go to research long tail keywords?

An easy way of pointing yourself in the right direction would be to browse through your web statistics for the past few of months. Take a look at the keywords that people have been using to find your website. If you see any "onesie-twosies", check to see where you are ranking on the search engines for those terms. If you are low, then you can think about developing more content for those keywords. The more content you create, the more you will notice those long tail keywords piling up.

Now that you have a quick and basic rundown of what long tail keywords are - what additional unique content do you think you can add to your site?

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