Long-Tail Keywords – And Why You Must Use Them

Long-tail keywords are groups of words that can be used to form a probable internet search. In other words, they are a prediction of what you think your customer may type, or say when they are searching for your products.

Why Long-Tail Keywords are important

Long-tail keywords are important to your business for three simple reasons.

1. Search engines (most importantly, Google) like them.
2. It helps your customer identify your products rather than that of someone else.
3. Competition for these is significantly less than for short nose keywords.

Let me explain these in a little more detail

Google prides itself on serving the exact content the searcher is looking for and serving it up to them very quickly. Using long-tail keywords in your product titles and description can quickly tell Google exactly what it is looking at. This has the added benefit of matching exactly what the person is looking for. In my previous post about keywords, I created an online shop selling shoes and I will use that again here as an example.

In that post, we built an opening sentence using the keywords shoes and footwear. Here it is

Welcome to Toe2Toe. We sell shoes for every occasion. All our footwear ranges come from the biggest brands and we think you will love our prices.

That clearly tells everybody what our website is about but now we need to go a little further. Why? Well, because the words ‘shoes’ and ‘footwear’ generate a lot of traffic, they are also very competitive. For your page to appear high up on the search engines you will be competing with some very large well-established companies. To put it very bluntly you do not stand a chance of ranking well for these two terms. So lets now consider adding some long-tail keywords to help level up the playing field a little.

Adding some Long-Tail Keywords

We are going to build a webpage on the site where we are going to have all our ladies shoes that have high heels. Of course, these will still be covered by our keywords ‘shoes’ and ‘footwear’ but this is a great opportunity to use some long-tail keywords to further define what the page is about. Our starting point to consider must always be ‘what will our customers search for?’ I would suggest people would search the expression ladies high heels shoes. We can check this using the Google Keyword Planner tool. You will learn more about this tool in a later post. Here is what it said

So we can see that Google estimates that there are between 100 and 1000 searches for that phrase every month. So if I use that particular long-tail keyword I should be able to pick up some of that traffic. That may not seem like a high number of people but remember they are people who are actually looking for the product you are selling. You can even target your product even more exactly by adding more words to your phrase.

A word of warning

If you go to exact for example; ladies red high heel shoes size 3 you may end up with so few monthly searches that you never generate any traffic to your site as seen below.

So there you have it. Why is it vitally important for your business to be using long-tail keywords. Of course, there is a place for our short nose keywords but we will look at that in another post.