Why It’s Good to Have a Long Tail.
August 15 2009
A common misconception by webmasters is that most traffic will come from a few “money” phrases or keywords. This isn’t true for any good, content rich websites as they can get traffic from phrases over four words in length. These are called long-tail keywords and are extremely valuable to any website.
The best keywords are two to four word phrases that accurately describe the website using language people searching for your kind of site would use. The art is choosing the phrases that don’t have so much competition that you can’t afford to compete. If the search terms are too general they will be expensive and even if you do get a good SERP from them, the conversion will probably be poor because the searchers might be looking for something specific. On the other hand, make the keywords or phrases too specific and you won’t see many visitors at all.
Single word keyword terms are a poor choice for optimizing a website. They are too broad and will be very competitive. Most SEO’s don’t go near these unless the client has money to burn. Put yourself in the shoes of a searcher for a moment. When you enter something into Google for instance do you use a single word or a phrase? Chances are if it’s something specific you use a phrase. This behavior needs to be mirrored in your search terms.
Even using keyword terms instead of a single word can be broad. Try to avoid this at all costs as it will have exactly the same result as above. Conversely don’t choose terms that are too specific. There is no real point in achieving a top SERP position for a term that nobody searches for. What’s the point of being at the top if nobody sees you.
So a good keyword phrase or term is long enough and descriptive enough to bring targeted visitors to your site, but not too specific that nobody uses them. This is a hard balance to make and a lot of thought should be given to these details. You want any optimization to target real visitors who are likely to turn into paying customers, not random people looking for something specific.
For example, if designing a site for a freelance copywriter you wouldn’t use “writer” because that would return over 11 million results. The term “copywriter” returns just under 4 million so these terms are too generic for an effective optimization. What about “freelance copywriter”? That returns 711,000, which is getting warmer, but we aren’t quite there yet. Drilling down a little further to “freelance copywriter, Naples”” returns 4,700 results, which is much better, and the term is specific enough to mainly send you qualified visitors.
The more time and research you expend on selecting keywords or terms the better results you will have. Although a website wants visitors, its only when those visitors become customers that you start earning money.
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