Long Tail Search

Millions of times a day searchers enter keywords and keyword phrases into the search engine search boxes. They’re searching for things you know about, things your website or your clients websites are centered around. Topics like:

  • Low income mortgage information
  • Creamed cucumbers recipe
  • How to relieve lower back pain
  • etc…

People come to the Internet to find information about specific topics, like those above. The keyword cars may have a search volume of a gazillion, but the chance that the searcher who typed it in will find exactly what they’re looking for is slim to nil. And besides, if you want to rank for the search term cars you’d better hire seomoz and pay them a gazillion dollars, cause that’s the only way you’ll get it.

The reason the searcher probably won’t find exactly what they want is because right now Google is returning 822,000,000 results for the search term cars. That’s a lot of websites for the searcher to weed through. This is where researching and optimizing for the long tail search becomes necessary.

Cars is a root word. When we start adding to it and making it a two, three, four… word phrase we begin to discover the Long Tail of cars:

  • cheap cars
  • cheap italian cars
  • purple vw bug cars
  • used cars san francisco california
  • hybrid cars
  • where to buy a hybrid car
  • You see where I’m going with this?

This is the information searchers are looking for, they want specifics. Deliver specifics. The way to bring targeted traffic to your website is to optimize for the long tail search terms. These are the terms that have the best chance of accomplishing your bottom line, of attracting the searcher who wants exactly what you offer.

As the tail gets longer, the search volume decreases, but the ability to list for the keyword phrase increases and the chance of making the sale also increases.

Recap:

  • Searchers want specific information (there are obviously exceptions)
  • The long tail keywords are the specifics of root keywords
  • Optimizing for the long tail brings targeted traffic to your website

The long tail is yours – go grab it!