Focusing on long-tail keywords is a great SEO tactic. Long-tail keywords are keywords or keyphrases that are more specific – and usually longer – than more commonly used keywords. Long-tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific. They allow you to gradually get more traffic to your site and be found by new and motivated audiences.
A long-tail keyword strategy can really help you out when there’s a lot of competition in your market. Or a lot of competition for the main keywords you want to rank for. That being said, most companies or blogs can benefit from this strategy as it helps you attract visitors with a very specific search intent. Here, I’ll explain what long-tail keywords are and how an understanding of your mission and product can help you set up a long-tail keyword strategy.
Book: The Long Tail
While preparing this blog post, Joost encouraged me to read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. This book discusses the emergence of markets (especially, markets on the internet) with unlimited supplies. Chris Anderson discovered that the true shape of demand, not filtered by the economics of scarcity shows a very long tail. This means that demand exists for virtually every niche, although this demand can become very small. An example could be a jukebox with 10.000 songs. A very small number of songs are played very regularly, while a large number of songs are played very few times. However, research shows that virtually all songs (about 98 %) are played at some point. The demand for these songs (that are large in number) is very small, but it does exist. Almost every song will be played at some point. With the emergence of the internet, possible target audiences became quite large, even if the product is only wanted by a very small percentage of the people. The wideness of the internet makes your niche product profitable and the ranking on long-tail keywords important.
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