Long Tail Keywords-Ultimate Guide to Generate More Traffic

For websites struggling to improve their visibility, search engine rankings, website traffic and domain authority, long-tail keywords are a windfall. Long-tail keywords help websites to boost their rankings no matter what the niche and how mighty the competition is. In fact, using long-tail keywords is the best way to survive in any of the competitive niches and achieve huge organic traffic (especially if you are a new or an unpopular website). Moreover, some research shows that websites can gain high rankings in just one year if they are optimized properly with long-tail keywords. Wondering how can you gain huge amounts of traffic with those long-tail keywords? Relax! This article is an ultimate guide that helps you with answers for how to find long-tail keywords and how to use long-tail keywords effectively to generate more traffic.

Long Tail Keywords-Ultimate Guide to Generate More Traffic-myvu

Long-tail keywords not only help your website to increase traffic but also helps users with the exact information they are searching for. This is the reason why search engines such as Google love to rank the webpages that are optimized for long-tail keywords on the top rather than that with short-tail keywords. After all, search engines’ aim is to provide users with a positive experience on the web by rendering them the most accurate information to their search query. And this is the reason why long-tail keywords are important. These possess more information about the user’s query, as they clearly express user intent. As you know user intent is the key factor in keyword research and optimization to boost the traffic.

Most people with basic knowledge of SEO and digital marketing get overwhelmed seeing the search volume of shorter keywords when they initially start their blog or site. Agreed, the high volume which also means the high traffic, and high returns build a surge in you to try for them. And it tempts you to rank for those keywords to drive that huge amount of traffic to your website and make money. 

But here you need to realize three important things,

  1. Not all those traffic can go only to your site as the competition is tough.
  2. You don’t know what the intent of that search is.
  3. Lastly, you are going to waste your time as ranking for short-tail or broad keywords is not that easy and you are already too late for the show.

Instead, you can aim for the unpopular yet worthy keywords which are going to do almost the same benefit that short-tail keywords do.

So, it is highly important to properly optimize your site with long-tail keywords. But before that, you need to know what are long-tail keywords, and why should you use them. So, let us learn them. Having that said article helps you to understand what are long-tail keywords and how to use them to monetize your website. 

What are Long-tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords are low-volume keywords (unpopular) that consist of more than 3 keywords phrases. They carry high user intent which is also known as commercial user intent. Though these seem drawing less traffic to the site, they bring powerful leads and foster conversion rate. Having that said, this is the reason why you need to focus more on long-tail keywords.

In order to make you understand the importance of these long tail keywords in-depth, we need to compare them with short-tail keywords. 

Short-tail keywords are highly popular and voluminous keywords that consist of not more than 2 words. In short, these are broad and seed keywords. 

Note: Not all keywords with less than two words are short-tail keywords. The reason, some business names such as Bath and Body Works, This American Life, etc. are the short-tail keywords as they are the names itself with no additional search intent added. So, all you want to notice is that size is not always the factor but the intent.

At the same time, not all keywords with less volume are not long-tail keywords. Keywords that are too specific and short also exist. For instance,

ubersuggest-keywordresearch-myvu

And still, short-tail keywords are the foundations for long-tail keywords.

There is an untold reason behind why they are called long-tail keywords. As the picture speaks better than words, the importance of long-tail keywords and the major difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords are well crafted on the below graph. Have a look at it…


ahort-tail-vs-longtail-keywords

Image Credit: Source

As you can observe the curve of long-tail keywords is long and narrow and covers a major part of the graph. Though the traffic for short-tail and top keywords is high, the number of different unpopular search queries is greater when compared. And that is why they are called long-tail keywords as you see the tail goes narrow and almost never-ending.

Examples for short-tail keywords:

Pet supplies

Nike shoes

Victoria Secret

Examples for long-tail keywords:

Pet supplies near me

White Nike sneakers men for sale

Victoria Secret Pink slides

If you see, you can clearly notice the commercial intent in the long-tail keyword examples that make them completely different and beneficial when compared to short-tail keywords. Users generally search with long-tail keywords and head into the appeared search results (websites or webpages that are ranked top) in order to make some purchases either online or offline. So, hope by now you’ve understood what are long tail keywords. Now, let’s discuss what are the amazing advantages of using them on your website so that you can prepare a checklist when you are ready to optimize your site.

Why Long-tail Keywords are Important for your Site?

Before you rush to find and use the long-tail keywords to generate more traffic to your site, know what you can expect additionally optimizing your site using them. Here are the top 10 reasons why you should use long-tail keywords in your website.

1. Less Competition

If you are a new website owner, the competition and keyword difficulty of short-tail keywords might overwhelm you. But you still stand chance to gain better ranks with long tail keywords.

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Long-tail keywords act as life saviors as they have less competition and zero keyword difficulty. Yet you can expect positive growth in your website traffic. 

Websites that are already popular also use long-tail keywords to maximize their visibility and provide users with a great search experience.

2. Targeted Traffic AKA Quality Leads

Having that said already, long-tail keywords consist of strong user intent you get the visitors who are likely to make a purchase or take certain action in your site. Therefore optimizing your webpage for targeted long-tail keywords means you are targeting potential customers. Not just that targeting long-tail keywords boost the overall traffic to your website. 

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If you get 10 visitors to a web page through long-tail keywords, there is a high chance that all those 10 visitors will convert well, or at least 7 of them will convert. Thus if you target multiple long-tail keywords through separate pages to your site, then there are high chances that you get notable quality traffic in huge quantities.

For instance,

The long-tail keyword “SEO agency near me” represents that the user wants to visit an SEO agency near him to boost his website traffic and increase his ROI – Here the visitors are likely to take action in your website (if you are ranking top).

Whereas the keyword “SEO agencies” has no clear search intent as the user might or might not want to visit the agency. He might either want to know the number of SEO agencies or want to know the benefits of SEO agencies.

3. Boost Conversion Rate

As you are driving potential traffic to your website through long-tail keywords, the conversion rate also soars. 

For instance,

A user searches with a keyword “ where to find Bluehost coupon code” means he wants a Bluehost coupon code to save some bucks while purchasing a Bluehost Webhosting plan. This also means if he visits your page and finds a working Bluehost discount code, he will definitely use it.

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However, it completely relies on how you showcase your products or services or content to convert the traffic. Higher the quality, higher conversion. It is as simple as that. So, don’t disappoint yourself and your customers with bad-quality. 

If you fail to deliver the content you promised in the title of the page, then you are simply increasing your bounce rate which is a negative ranking factor.

4. Power to Survive Even in High Competition

As discussed it is difficult to rank for the keywords with a huge competition that too in competitive niches. But that is the case with only short-tail and broader keywords. That rarely applies to long-tail keywords. Because there are many topics and questions that are not covered yet even by popular brands. You can take advantage of those uncovered keywords and grab a chance to play in the tough game. Isn’t it great?

 Long-Tail-Keywords-Ultimate-Guide-to-Generate-More-Traffic

You can discover those keywords with long-tail keyword research which you are going to learn in this article in a couple of seconds.

5. Faster and Long-Lasting Results

Expecting faster results for short-tail keywords is a bad idea. Because it takes years to rank in the first 3 pages of search results especially if you are a new blog or website. This is the reason why long-tail keywords have gained importance in SEO campaigns. Using powerful long-tail keywords properly you can expect the results even before the expected time and if your content meets the standards, they are going to stay on the same page for a longer period. There is not an ounce of doubt in that. 

Long Tail Keywords-Ultimate Guide to Generate More Traffic

6. Improve DA

Long-tail keywords play a unique role in increasing domain authority. As the long-tail keywords are easy to rank keywords because of the above points namely, less competition, lower bounce rate, huge organic traffic, high conversion and long-lasting results. 

 Long Tail Keywords-Ultimate Guide to Generate More Traffic-myvu

And it is better to rank for at least some keywords rather than nothing, your domain authority gradually increases in your niche. As your domain authority increases the chances of ranking also increases for the main keywords. It’s highly a win situation for you.

7. Cut Down PPC Costs

Long-tail keywords drive targeted organic traffic to your site. There is no doubt about that. So, you can skip running paid advertisements to the maximum extent while you are already gaining the same benefits with long-tail keywords. PPC works better and brings you great results, agreed. But, not every website needs it every time. Optimize your website first with targeted long-tail keywords, get backlinks, improve the content quality, observe the results and analyze how does it work. You can go opt PPC during peak times of your business, thus cutting down the extra costs.

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8. Improve Rankings for Seed Keywords

If you optimize your blog or a web page well with worthy long-tail keywords and powerful backlinks, chances are there that you can rank on the first page of search results. Also, as you start ranking for a number of keywords, your domain authority increases and so you get the chance to rank even better for popular keywords. As you know search engines crawl the popular domains (domains with higher DA) faster and rank them better.

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9. Never-Ending Keyword Ideas

No matter which niche you serve, you have unlimited content ideas. Be it an electronics blog, or technology blog or even handcraft ideas blog, there are amazing topics and ideas to create content and rank for them. 

For instance,

Consider yours is a blog related to freelancing. You can cover topics such as

Tips to grow your freelance career

How to handle work from home stress

How to make your first-time clients come back for more

Remote working tips for beginners

And the list goes on

amazing-content-ideas-myvu

Thus there are amazing and money-making content ideas everywhere. All you need to do is to discover them and use them properly to make cash from it.

Though all the blogs you create with long-tail keywords may not make you money, but yet they add value to your overall website growth. So, do not only concentrate on money-making content but also provide some informational content for your users for free. They will never go waste.

10. Draw Loyal Visitors

With the long-tail keywords, you are not only growing your site traffic but also helping the internet users. As said there are many topics untold, there are many queries of users that are unsaid.

So, covering those narrow topics will help you build a relationship with the users. Reason – you answered them first. Thus you can earn loyal visitors to your site who are also quality leads and potential customers.

long-tail-keywords-drive-loyal-visitors-myvu

Moreover, a number of new queries are generated each day that are not available in the reports of SEO tools. You can gain benefits from it if you can guess them even before your competitors do.

These are the reasons why you should use long-tail keywords in your site.

Now, you are clear with what you are going to get if you include long-tail keywords in your SEO campaign, right? So, now let’s get started to find them.

How to find Long-tail Keywords?

Yes, in order to use them, you need to first find them which is not that simple, not that painful either.

Reports show, nearly 75% of organic traffic comes from long-tail keywords, a fact that most people oversee. Hence, if done properly you can generate the traffic that is greater than estimated. But how to find long tail keywords that generate more traffic? Here are a few simple yet effective ways to find long-tail keywords that help in your website growth for free. So, shall we get started?

Google Predictions

Google does the user’s job much easier by guessing their search intent even before they type and hit enter. But what’s surprising here is that the search engine giant Google not only eases user’s journey but also helps SEOs like you. Wondering how to find long-tail keywords with Google Predictions?

Well, Google autocomplete searches are related and trending long-tail keywords predicted by Google itself. Meaning people are searching for them. Therefore you can make use of them.

All you need to do is simple. Open a new tab and type a seed keyword of your website, you will see a series of suggestions, like the picture below.

You can repeat this step multiple times with different seed keywords to have an ample amount of long-tail keywords in your list.

The process takes some time, but it’s worth it.

Next, enter any search query and scroll to the bottom of the result page. You will find “related search results” which are your long-tail keywords again. Pick the ones that are really related, relevant and fresh to create your blog posts.

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You can also take help from “people also ask” that appears in between the search results to add up more value to your blog posts.

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Thus Google predictions help you to move a step forward in optimizing your website with worthy and powerful long-tail keywords.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free keyword tool that helps you find thousands of keywords in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is enter a keyword in the search bar, select a preferable region and wait for the results to load. 

You can see tons of results and further filter them to jot down the worthy long-tail keywords. Filter questions, and prepositions to view the keyword ideas and content ideas. 

ubersuggest-longtail-keyword-research-myvu

You can also see the SEO difficulty, volume, CPC and paid difficulty which are helpful to analyze and decide which keywords to pick. Ubersuggest also helps you see the top search results with additional information such as backlinks, number of visits, links, and domain score without you search for them manually.

Thus this tool acts as a helping hand and offers many valuable insights.

Answer The Public

This is one of the best tools to discover what people are searching for. Having that said, there are at least 30% of new searches that are not reported in popular SEO tools. Answer The Public helps you even with those fresh and hot search queries people feel comfortable to ask only Google. 

 answerthepublic.com-myvu

Finding competent long-tail keywords is quite simple with this tool. With a single click, you will get to see an extensive number of suggestions. 

As you see you can select questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical and related keywords with which you can create a beautiful post and draw voluminous traffic. You can simply, download the CSV file without wasting any time to jot them down on a piece of paper or on a sheet.

SEMrush

The above three Google Predictions, Ubersuggest and Answer The Public are free yet effective ways for the people with a limited budget. But when you can afford a premium SEO tool, SEMrush is the best option. This helps you with maximum keyword metrics along with the keyword suggestions.

SEMrush-keyword-research-myvu

As you see above, you can find many long tail keywords with great volume. Filter them according to questions, broad match, phrase match etc. and export the data to your sheet. 

You can also gain some keyword insights by analyzing your competitors. Yes, finding what long-tail keywords are working for your competitors is one of the best ways to stock up your keywords list. You can do this on SEMrush by simply entering your competitor domain name and hitting keyword overview. Readout SEMRush review to learn how to use the tool more effectively.

You will find the keyword variations, questions, and related keywords with volume that even include a good number of long-tail keywords. With this information, you can guess what users might search to reach you. Thus you become closer to your audience who need you but often fail in reaching you.Keyword_Overview_SEMrush

So you have learned how to find long-tail keywords. Now its time to learn how to use them on your website. 

How to use Long-Tail Keywords to Boost your Site Traffic?

Inserting the long-tail keywords you have found into your content on your website or blog is simple. But not always you can gain results. Though after doing thorough keyword research and having a bulky list of keywords most people fail to rank for the targeted long-tail keywords and drive traffic. The reason is quite simple – they don’t know how to use long-tail keywords correctly on their websites. 

Not All Keywords are Important

The key here is not all keywords you have gathered work with the same strategy, as their importance is different. Only people who understand the subject of these long-tail keywords properly boost their traffic.

Some long-tail keywords might be the parent topics directly, that have good search traffic and competition whereas some others are just the chains of it with low volume. The latter ones are not as worthy as the first ones.

For instance,

Weight loss diet plan – this is a parent keyword

7-day diet plan to lose weight – this is just a relevant keyword that gives the almost the same search results

Simply put, you need to find out which are the main and worthy topics and which are just the sub-topics that have no much value in the search engine’s point of view. As the search engines group the sub-topics into the parent topics and display the results that are broad so that users access the maximum information.

If you are focussing on these sub-topics or child keywords, then you are simply wasting your time. It is because each single blog post of yours should be unique. Writing two different blogs on the same topic doesn’t make any sense right?

However, you can still use them in your content as, after all, they are also related keywords that support the main keywords.

So, how can you discover the worthy long-tail keywords? Simple, do some guesswork. Or use Ahrefs SEO tool to find them.

Provide Great Search Experience for Users

Have you ever found inaccurate results for your search query on Google? Yes, there are still many topics or questions for which Google hasn’t answers. And yes even Google fails to deliver some search results. So, Google tries to provide a positive search experience by showing the nearest results. But you know what, it still fails sometimes.

Here dawns the opportunity for you! Help the search engine in providing the users with accurate search results. Create the content for the long-tail keywords that are not available on search engines. Thus you attain a high to rank top for those search results.

Also, for some of the long-tail keywords, you can find informative videos as top search results. Meaning there are no websites or blogs that provide exact answers for the user’s query. You can take advantage of this situation as well.

The other important scenario where you can take advantage is when Quora or Reddit are ranked top for a search query. This means none of the blogs have accurate answers. So, you can make most out of this situation and the specific long-tail keyword to provide users a great experience. Thus you will not only drive maximum traffic to your site but also genuine and loyal users. 

If you can show up at the top of the page for the search queries multiple times, there are high chances that people will remember you. Isn’t it the best way to create brand awareness and create a unique identity? 

But the downside is that discovering the uncovered long-tail keywords takes time. All you need to do is test the search results for the lower search volume keywords manually. So that you can identify if the search results are either blogs or quora or videos.

Thus if you move forward with a mindset to deliver good user experience, you can drive the traffic faster.

Focus on Content

If you say, you ran out of content ideas, then you are out of the game. Yes, this is the first and only rule here. So, have a team that delivers high-quality content in huge quantities (not always). Now, you have a big list of long-tail keywords, you have filtered out the sub-topics from it and have chosen the main long-tail keywords. It’s time to play with them, create high-quality and useful content using those long-tail keywords properly. Make sure you do thorough research and understand the search intent. 

Note: Include short videos or images related to the topic for better visibility.

A right number of keywords and keyword phrases are necessary to rank top and drive huge organic traffic. This might be the reason why sometimes you don’t drive estimated traffic though you optimized it well. So, try including the right number of related and relevant keywords in your content to not miss the opportunity to rank better. Make a habit of using questions in your content to show up in the featured snippets which is a better way to drive traffic. As said above, use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. to find the keywords that contribute to your site growth.

The next step you should do is optimize the heading tags, images and meta title & description for the targeted keywords. Ensure you optimized the content and web page well enough so that you don’t give chances for your competitors. Else some others might get inspired by your post (find faults) and outrank you.

Add Links to Main Pages

You are not yet done if you just write blogs for the long-tail keywords that are parent topics and use adequate supported keywords. In order to make this long-tail keywords strategy to work, provide links to the important pages in your site that are relevant to these blogs. 

Thus you can build strong internal links structure and allow users to delve into more information at the same time. But make sure you use proper anchor text, else you are considered as a Black Hat SEO follower. The other most important thing you need to remember here is to provide links only if content demands, do not overuse the links and make it look spammy.

Bottom Line

Though long-tail keywords are termed as unpopular keywords and less-competition keywords, they are not useless. You need them right away to generate more traffic to your site. It is important to take these long-tail keywords seriously in your SEO campaign. However, when you are creating content targeting the long-tail keywords make sure you are using the right and parent keywords. As discussed above Google groups the keywords based on their intent and importance. So, do thorough keyword research before you start on-page optimization of your site. Create powerful content with targeted long-tail keywords and get good number of quality backlinks to boost your page ranking. Refer to this long-tail keywords guide whenever you feel your website needs some boost. Hope this guide helps you in driving huge traffic and generating more leads.

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