What is a Long-Tail Key­word Phrase? And Why Should You Care?

Long Tail Key­word Phrase - you’ve prob­a­bly heard all the fuss about it. But what re­ally is it? What does it mean and how can it help you?

The ‘long-tail’ is a term given to a key­word phrase that is longer than the nor­mal key­word phrase that you may have in the past been tar­get­ing to gain or­ganic traf­fic from the search engines.

Let me explain.

In the past it was com­mon place to tar­get highly traf­fi­ca­ble key­words that were very pop­u­lar in your niche in the hope that you would be able to gain a share of this huge amount of traffic.

For ex­am­ple, if you had built a site about in­ter­net mar­ket­ing and search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion you would have done your key­word re­search and dis­cov­ered that the term „search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion” was searched for over 450,000 times per month. So nat­u­rally you would have op­ti­mized your pages for this key­word phrase to try to get a list­ing on the first page of the search en­gines (SERPs) to cap­i­tal­ize on this traffic.

Then you would have fo­cused on op­ti­miz­ing a web­page for the next high­est key­word phrase - and then the next - and then the next. And so on.

Ba­si­cally most peo­ple only ever fo­cus their ef­forts on the top 20 search terms and for­get about the rest as there just does­n’t seem to be enough re­ward in op­ti­miz­ing a web­page on a long-tail key­word phrase that only gets a hand­ful of vis­i­tors each day.

For in­stance, a long-tail key­word phrase for your in­ter­net mar­ket­ing site may be „search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion key­words”, but as this term only gets about 390 searches a month you de­cide to for­get about it. It’s just not worth the ef­fort, par­tic­u­larly when you can get 450,000 vis­i­tors by op­ti­miz­ing for a more pop­u­lar key­word like „search en­gine optimization”.

But let’s face it.

There are only 10 spots on the first page of any search en­gine, so the odds of you be­ing able to gain a top spot for com­pet­i­tive key­words such as „search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion” is re­mote at best. How­ever this does­n’t de­ter most peo­ple as the lure of a share of 450,000 vis­i­tors is just too compelling.

The end re­sult is that for most peo­ple this just does­n’t hap­pen and as a re­sult they never achieve the traf­fic they hope for. So they give up try­ing and never reach the heights that they expected.

But here’s the real twist…

Some of the mar­keters who do get lucky and get a high list­ing for one of their main key­words still don’t see the long-term re­wards they had thought they would achieve with a top search en­gine list­ing for a pop­u­lar key­word. And it’s all due to not fo­cus­ing on the „long-tail”.

Let me give you an ex­am­ple to ex­plain what I mean.

For one mo­ment let’s as­sume you have built an in­ter­net mar­ket­ing web­site and af­ter a lot of ef­fort and hard work you fi­nally achieve the #1 spot for your top key­word. In fact, your top 20 key­words are send­ing you 15,000 vis­i­tors a day to your web­site from the search en­gines and you’re mak­ing a good in­come from mon­e­tiz­ing this traffic.

You’re get­ting heaps of free traf­fic and the money is rolling in. What more could you ask for. Life is great!

The trou­ble is that in your ex­cite­ment to op­ti­mize your site for the top key­word phrases in your niche, you for­get about the long-tail key­word phrases. But hey, who cares. Your top key­words bring in 95% of your traf­fic, so you don’t need to worry about the smaller stuff. It’s just not worth the effort.

Then you wake up one morn­ing and check your web stats.

Dis­as­ter!

Your traf­fic has dropped from 15,000 to a mere 500 overnight. You hur­riedly check the po­si­tion of your key­words and dis­cover that Google has had a dreaded up­date and you’re no longer on the front page for your main key­words. In fact, you’ve gone from the first page to the 7^th page.

All of a sud­den in­stead of earn­ing $10k per month, you’re look­ing at maybe $500 if you’re lucky. Ba­si­cally your en­tire busi­ness has been de­stroyed overnight. And if you think this is an iso­lated case, think again. This sce­nario is re­peated every time the search en­gines up­date their algorithms.

Now imag­ine that rather than just fo­cus­ing en­tirely on the pop­u­lar key­words, you de­cided to fo­cus on the long-tail key­word phrases to drive traf­fic to your site. But rather than fo­cus on just a few long-tail key­words, you fo­cus on 200 such key­words. Com­bined these key­words can drive more traf­fic to your site than what your most com­pet­i­tive key­words can.

Yes it’s a lot more work - but re­mem­ber, you want to build a long-term sus­tain­able in­ter­net busi­ness, so it’s not go­ing to be easy. The re­wards will be worth it.

And here’s the real ex­cit­ing part - you are get­ting traf­fic from a wider range of key­words. So if one of your top rank­ings key­words bites the dust, it won’t have a huge af­fect on your busi­ness as you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.

Peo­ple who search us­ing long-tail key­words are highly tar­geted po­ten­tial cus­tomers. They have al­ready done their pre­lim­i­nary searches and are now to­tally fo­cused on ex­actly what they want and there­fore they are more likely to con­vert to cus­tomers than some­one who does a broader key­word search.

So while you may not get as many vis­i­tors to your site if you fo­cus your ef­forts on long-tail key­word phrases, your vis­i­tors are more likely to con­vert into cus­tomers at a much higher rate - plus you have cre­ated a LONG-TERM busi­ness in that you are not at the mercy of the search en­gines and it is un­likely that you would be wiped out overnight.

So the next time you built a niche site, don’t for­get to go long for the long term key­word phrase!