SEO advice: Make way for long tail keywords to better connect with customers and watch increased traffic from a targeted audience flow to your website.
Defining keywords and ranking for them is necessary to attract the right clients to your site and ensure a high ROI. “Head” keywords e.g. “real estate”, are broad terms with one or two words. These tend to be popular but highly competitive and, according to Moz, only make up 30% of searches.
However, there exists a highly attractive long tail keyword strategy, with long tail keywords making up 70% of all searches. Long tail keywords consist of three or more words, for example “luxury real estate to buy in the South of France, near Valbonne” as opposed to a more simple head key word “real estate”. The long tail keywords are less competitive as they have a lower search volume however they directly target a key audience and their intent. This means that they lead to a higher click through rate.
User intent: Customers using long tail key words tend to be closer to the point of purchase as they have a clearer idea of what they want; in other words, long tail key words lead to a higher conversion rate. For example, if I type “villa in France” into Google, then I might be teasing with the idea of buying a property in France. Equally, I may just want a picture of a villa or I may be looking for a holiday and so on. However, a long tail key word such as “luxury villa to rent in the South of France 5 bedrooms, Swimming pool” indicates that I have thought about the exact requirements that I want the search to fulfil and that I am closer to the point of purchase. Sites using long tail keywords will receive a lower volume of traffic heading to their site, however traffic will be of a greater quality and lead to a higher conversion rate making them an efficient and cost-effective strategy.
Indeed, Google and other search engines constantly strive to become a destination for people to get answers rather than a list of sources from which to find an answer. The advantages of long tail keywords are that they create better lines of communication between businesses and customers leading to a higher ROI. In organic searches long tail keywords are more relevant to search terms and they produce a higher click through and conversion rate. In terms of paid ads, they are less competitive and thus have a reduced cost per click. Like organic searches, the advert’s specificity means they have higher ad rankings and a lower bounce rate as customers are getting direct and highly relevant search results and therefore time-on-page metrics increase. By using long tail keywords, both organic and paid search rankings produce a higher ROI as they target quality traffic volume to your site.
Long tail keywords afford your business agility. As headwords create a large traffic volume, if you fall in a SERP for a head term your business can hugely suffer. However, long tail keywords that allow for a larger web of combinations and diversity will not disrupt your business if a few phrases slip in ranking position.
As well as affording agility, long tail keywords help support the ranking position of your head keywords. Whilst attaining high rankings for long tail keywords you can boost pages that have the less targeted but highly competitive head keyword by linking to them from your high ranking targeted long tail keyword pages.
For long tail keyword strategies to work, you have got to be creative and get into the mind of the customer. With the increasing multitude of things out there on the web and the advancement in digital technology, the direction of the internet search moves away from simplicity towards conversation. For example, where is the nearest airport to Valbonne? Where can I find Chinese ingredients in Nice? Where can I find information about chartering a yacht in the Caribbean? And so on. This trend harnesses the potentiality of long tail keywords. So don’t get left behind and disrupt your business by attempting to only compete for the hardest head keywords but instead ride the long tail keyword train to success.