Why You Need to Focus on Long-Tail Keywords For SEO

Long-tail keywords are often overlooked. Regarding search engine optimization (SEO), it's easy to focus on high-volume, short-tail keywords. After all, short-tail keywords tend to get the most search traffic, which makes them the most valuable.

However, it's essential to also focus on long-tail keywords as part of your SEO strategy. These longer, more specific phrases may not get as much search traffic individually, but they can add up to a significant portion of your overall traffic and can be easier to rank for. 

In this article, we'll explain why you need to focus on long-tail keywords for SEO and how to incorporate them into your strategy.

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-tail keywords are more specific, longer phrases with a lower search volume than short-tail keywords.

The term long-tail doesn’t stem from the fact that these keywords tend to be longer, instead, they get their name from where they are on the “search demand” curve.

The head of the graph contains keywords with the highest search volume. They only make up a small part of the graph, which is why they’re called short-tail keywords.

As the curve flattens, the number of keywords raises, although the search volume drops quickly. These keywords make up over 91% of all keywords and get their name from the “long-tail” they create on the graph.

One way to think about long-tail keywords, is to consider the difference between a general term such as “burger”, versus a more specific term such as “gluten-free vegan burger”.

 A general term such as burger will most likely be searched for more, and produce a much larger and wider set of results, a long-tail keyword will provide a more specific set of results, and has a higher probability to lead to a sale.

These longer, more specific phrases tend to be more targeted and relevant to a particular product or service, and as such, they are more likely to convert into sales or leads.

Why Are Long-Tail Keywords Important?

There are several reasons why long-tail keywords are important for the overall success of a website or business. 

Here are 8 reasons why long-tail keywords are important.

1. Long-Tail Keywords Are Less Competitive

One of the most important reasons why you should be using long-tail keywords is because they are less competitive than more commonly used short-tail keywords. 

This could make it much easier to rank higher for a certain long-tail keyword than trying to compete with a much more widely used and written about keyword.

Using Ahref’s free keyword generator, let’s look at some examples.

The first keyword I searched was “burger”. As you can see, “burger” has over 750K+ searches in the last 24 hours. It has a difficulty score (KD) of 82. This will be an extremely difficult keyword to rank well for.

The top 2 searches are Burger King and Wikipedia when you search burger. 

It’s no surprise that a worldwide burger franchise finds itself at the top of the rankings. The rest of the top 10 are made out of other burger franchises, burger recipes, and large websites posting reviews like people.com and latimes.com.

Next, I’ll check out our long-tail keyword “gluten-free vegan burger”.

Immediately, you’ll notice that the KD for this search term is only 3. In the last 3 weeks, it’s only had 80 searches. This makes it the perfect long-tail keyword to use.

Searching for our long-tail keyword, gluten-free vegan burgers, brings up very different results. In fact, as you can see, there are no food chains taking advantage of this search term. The top 2 results are recipes, and the third is a list of the best frozen vegan burger brands.

Long-tail keywords are especially good to use for smaller businesses or websites that may not have the resources or budget to compete with larger, more established websites for short-tail keywords.

2. Long-Tail Keywords Are More Specific and Targeted

Because of how most long-tail keywords look, they are much more specific or targeted. 

Because of the targeted nature of long-tail keywords, they are more likely to be used by someone further along the sales funnel. 

 This increases the likelihood that they might purchase something from your business.

This is also why perfecting long-tail keywords is crucial for ecommerce websites, which need to attract highly qualified traffic that’s more likely to convert.

A great example of winning with long-tail keywords comes from the ecommerce giant, Amazon.

Firstly, I searched “shoes”. What I am actually looking for is Nike’s. In this case, Nike did not even make the top 10. Also, no sign of Amazon.

Most users who are looking to buy a pair of shoes, already have a brand, or even a specific type of shoe within a brand in mind.

Now comes the interesting part. I searched the term “Air Max”. Still, a short-tail keyword, albeit more specific.

Nike comes out on top. As they should, since it is their very own creation. But, let’s be a bit more specific and see what happens.

I searched using the long-tail keyword “blue men’s Air Max” and Amazon came out on top. Props to Nike for getting second place, but it shows how well Amazon is optimized for search engines, outranking the actual shoe manufacturer.

3. Long-Tail Keywords Improve User Experience

Another benefit of long-tail keywords is that they can help to improve the user experience on a website. 

Using relevant, more specific keywords throughout your website, you’ll be able to better provide search results for users on your website. In turn, this should help increase the time they spend on your site, and boost engagement and bounce rates.

4. Better Conversion Rates

Studies have shown that the average conversion rate for long-tail keywords is 4.15 times that of short-tail keywords.

It’s because of this that long-tail keywords might even make better PPC campaigns than short-Tail keywords.

It’ll depend on what your intent is with the long-tail keyword. Ranking well, using short-tail keywords will result in much higher traffic, albeit with a lower conversion rate. 

These high-quality leads are much easier to convert than trying to convince a person who was never interested in the first place.

If you're running an ecommerce store, it’s vital that you are able to capitalize on these customers. That means ranking well for the long-tail keywords and also creating a well-optimized sales page to convert the user.

The reason why a large percentage of businesses struggle is because of an incomplete or lack of a proper sales funnel.

A sales funnel is built to lead a user down a funnel consisting of seven steps. Going from initial contact, down all the way to closing the deal. If you have a blog post that incorporates the use of long-tail keywords, you can sail through the first 5 steps.

Depending on where a user finds your website, whether it be an advertisement, organic search, or referral, they might find themselves somewhere in the middle of the sales funnel initially. It is up to you to get them to the negotiation stage and then close the deal. For this, you need to build customer trust. To do that, you need to provide as much information as you can to them.

It’s one of the reasons why many companies create blogs. The more high-ranking pages you create, the more traffic you’ll get, which means more chances to send users down your sales funnel toward conversion.

A well-optimized sales page will do wonders for your sales funnel towards the end. If you’d like to know more about creating sales pages that convert, check out this article.

5. They Bring in Most of Your Organic Traffic

This is perhaps the most obvious point, but it also shows how important long-tail keywords are for you. To get a closer look, go through your Google Analytics reports. When you scan the queries, you’ll find that most of the traffic comes to you through long-tail keywords.

These are the terms you’re getting impressions for, and they are the ones generating the clicks. If you have an ecommerce website, they will even help you generate sales. The deeper you dig into keyword research, the more you’ll find that long-tail keywords are fueling your traffic.

To find long-tail keywords, you can use tools such as KWFinder, Semrush, and Ahrefs. Just as is the case with the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll get loads of similar keywords. You can even see the difficulty level of ranking for those keywords along with your competition. These will not only help you come up with more article ideas but also help you choose what to write about.

In this case, I used the “Keyword Magic Tool” on Semrush. After searching for a keyword, I filtered to a search volume of 11-100 to find long-tail keywords.

In conclusion, long-tail keywords are essential for a variety of reasons. They are less competitive than short-tail keywords and are easier to rank.

Types of Long-tail Keywords

There are several types of long-tail keywords that can be used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes:

Geographically Targeted Keywords

These are keywords that include a location, such as “restaurants in Las Vegas” or “plumbers in New York City.” These types of keywords are especially important for local businesses that want to attract customers from a specific geographic area. Here’s an example of a geographically targeted keyword’s results.

As you can see, Google will offer results of businesses, as well as key information about each. In this case, “plumbers in New York City”, offered the location and details of three plumbers in the area. 

Ranking well for a geographically targeted keyword is crucial if you’re using a brick-and-mortar shop. It can help you gain high-quality leads if your information ranks high on search engines.

Transactional Keywords

These keywords are important for ecommerce stores that want to attract customers that are ready to purchase something. Keywords such as “buy” or “order” fall under transactional keywords.

Terms like this would look something like “buy a Ford” or “purchase a golf bag”.

A quick search for “buy a golf bag” finds a golf store at number 1, and yet again Amazon. In fact, most household appliances and equipment with the word “buy” before it, will give you an Amazon result within the top 5.

Informational Keywords

These  keywords indicate that a user is looking for information, such as “how to,” “what is,” or “definition of.” 

These keywords are beneficial for education and informational websites and blogs. Although, some of these keywords aren’t long-tail, because of their high search volumes, since some questions can still be vague.

It’s the difference between “what is SEO’, versus “what are the benefits of SEO”.

“What is SEO” has a decent search volume, but is also extremely difficult to rank for with a KD score of 100.

“What are the benefits of SEO” has a much lower KD score of 61, but also a lower search volume.

Navigational Keywords

These are keywords that are used to find a specific website or webpage, such as a brand name or the name of a specific product or service.

These keywords tend to be brand names or specific products and services. Users would search something like “Semrush premium package,” or “price of Adidas Ultraboost shoes”. 

Commercial Investigation Keywords

These are keywords that indicate that a user is considering making a purchase, but is still in the research phase. These types of keywords can include terms such as “reviews,” “comparison,” or “discount.”

These keywords are used by users who are still in the research phase. They’ve decided to make a purchase, but aren’t sure which product or service they want to choose.

In this case, words such as “reviews”, “comparison”, “discounts”, and “best of” are used.

Long-Tail Variations of Short-Tail Keywords

These variations are more specific versions of short-tail keywords, but with a much lower search volume. An example would simply be “shirt” to “blue Hawaiian men’s shirt”. 

These variations tend to have some of the lowest search volumes of all the long-tail keywords, simply because there are so many different possibilities, making it hard to really define a web page around it.

In general, it is important to use a variety of long-tail keywords in order to rank for a larger number of search terms and to attract a wider range of qualified traffic to a website.

How to Find Long-Tail Keywords

There are a number of different ways to find long-tail keywords that may be relevant to your business or website:

Use Keyword Research Tools

There are plenty of excellent tools available online created with the sole purpose of helping you find keywords. Some have options of looking specifically for long-tail keywords like Semrush.

There are also plenty of free keyword generators that you can use, like Keyword.io and Ahrefs free keyword generator.

Look at Your Website’s Analytics

Your website’s performance and analytics will tell you a lot about what your visitors are looking for. If you’re getting a lot of queries about a specific thing, or users are searching for something that you don’t have, you’re losing valuable traffic and leads. 

Try to use these issues in your favor by creating content using those keywords. Not only will visitors stay longer on your site and possibly make a purchase or subscribe, but it should help you drive more organic traffic and rank better.

One way to do this is to look at pages that are performing really well and try to capitalize on that by creating more content within that niche. For example, if you’re getting a lot of traffic on a page about computer software, but your website focuses more on hardware, don’t shy away from creating more content about software.

Use Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a tried and true method that has been around as long as brick-and-mortar shops existed.

It’s a simple concept. Get a customer, ask their honest opinion, take note, and try to cater to it. With the internet, it’s even easier to get opinions. Even better online, since most people are more comfortable giving their honest opinions behind a screen, than in person.

Set up a dedicated page for feedback, as well as send out emails after online purchases are made with a questionnaire.

Customer feedback will provide you with gaps that you might have missed. These areas that customers want you to improve or add to should be your main concern when creating new content.

Use Public Forums and Boards

Public forums like Reddit and Quora are an excellent way to find new long-tail keywords. Every day, there are plenty of questions and answers posted about topics, which could very well turn out to be long-tail keywords.

In this instance, I went on Reddit, and searched long-tail keywords. That’s the short-tail keywords. Below you’ll see one of the first posts that popped up was the question “does the number of keywords really matter?

After entering that into Semrush’s Magic Keyword Tool, I didn’t find any results. It’s search volume was 0.

That didn’t stop me from finding a way to utilize this keyword. Next, I entered it in Google Search and found some excellent ideas for long-tail keywords I could possibly use to outrank competitors.

Look at Your Competitors

Keep your customers close, but your competitors even closer. Never forget to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, whether it’s successful, and what you can do to improve upon what they’re doing.

One way is to do keyword gap analysis. This is when you compare your competitor's keywords to yours. You’ll get an overview of keywords they’re ranking high for, as well as recent keywords that might have fallen a bit.

Software such as Semrush and Ahrefs works well for this. They both offer a keyword gap analysis tool.

Use Google's Autocomplete 

Using Google’s autocomplete can be risky, but shouldn’t be left out completely. The only issue with using Google’s autocomplete would be that some of the recommendations won’t actually be long-tail keywords, since those will most likely be searched for a lot as well.

By using a combination of these techniques, you should be able to identify a wide range of long-tail keywords that are relevant to your business or website.

Examples of Long-Tail Keywords

Here are some examples of long-tail keywords:

Questions

Questions are easily one of the most commonly searched things on search engines. In fact, 8% of all searched terms online are questions.

Some examples are:

• “What are the best hiking trails in the Blue Ridge Mountains?”
• “How do I fix a leaky faucet?”

Prepositional phrases

These phrases tend to have an object and a preposition.

For example:

• “for sale in New York City”
• “near me open now”

Comparisons

These articles are quite popular, not only in written form but also in video format on platforms like YouTube. Users who are already intent on buying a product will most likely want to compare different variations of the product from different brands.

Some examples are:

• “Nissan Almera vs. Honda Civic”
• “iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy”

Modifiers:

Modifiers are a great way to catch a few extra keywords and possibly rank a bit higher when someone searches for them. Instead of just using a single or two word phrase, try adding a modifier like these examples:

• “organic gluten-free bakery”
• “budget-friendly vacation rentals”

Misspellings

Misspellings are one of the easiest ways to make sure you aren’t losing valuable traffic. Although autocorrect exists, and search engines like Google will automatically offer the correct spelling, people still make mistakes.

You might rank a bit lower with the correct spelling, but capitalizing on the wrong spelling might bump your rankings a few numbers up if someone misspells it. Just make sure that these are commonly misspelled words.

• “carribean cruises”
• “labrador retriever breeders”

Niche-specific language

Another excellent way to utilize long-tail keywords is to use lingo only used in a specific niche.

Not only does it cater to your audience, shows search engines that you know what you’re talking about, but it also helps to use them to rank higher on search engines. 

• “3D printing filaments”
• “agile project management tools”

How to Use Long-Tail Keywords

Here are a few tips on how to use long-tail keywords effectively:

• Include long-tail keywords in your website's content: The easiest way to use long-tail keywords is to include them within your content. When writing your articles, make sure that you write with the intent in mind. The best way to do this is to think what the user wants to gain from reading this article. Make sure to include primary keywords every 1000 words, and to sprinkle in secondary keywords throughout.

• Use long-tail keywords in your website's titles and headings: The title of your webpage, along with the meta description, is an indication to search engines what the page will be about. Including these long-tail keywords within the title, as well as headings throughout the page should help any crawler better understand the page, index it better, therefore ranking it higher.

• Use long-tail keywords in your website's meta tags: Meta tags are snippets of text that describe the content on a webpage.

• Use long-tail keywords in your website's URLs: URLs should be short and to the point, it has been shown that search engines prefer shorter URLs. That does not mean you should avoid long-tail keywords in them. In fact, using long-tail keywords in your URL could help it index better.
• Use long-tail keywords in your website's alt tags: Alt tags are used to describe the content of images on a webpage. It’s been known for a while now that web-crawlers to scan images, specifically looking at the alt tags of pictures. These alt tags are added to help a user know what the image is showing if it doesn’t load properly. It also helps search engines know what the picture is about.

By using long-tail keywords in a variety of different elements of your website, you can help to improve the visibility of your site for these keywords and attract highly qualified traffic that is more likely to convert into sales or leads.

The 5 Best Tools for Finding long-tail keywords

There are many tools that can be useful for finding long-tail keywords, and the best one for you will depend on your specific needs and budget. Here are five options that are popular among marketers and SEO professionals:

1. Google Keyword Planner

This is a free tool from Google that is designed for advertisers, but it can also be helpful for finding long tail keywords. 

It allows you to see the average monthly search volume for different keywords, as well as the level of competition for each keyword.

You can use this tool to find keywords related to your business or industry, and then sort the results by search volume or competition level to find the most promising keywords.

2. Semrush

SEMrush is another popular platform that offers a wide range of SEO and keyword research features. 

SEMrush also provides data on the search volume and difficulty level of ranking for each keyword, as well as information on the websites that are ranking for those keywords.

It also offers a free version with limited functionality but works well enough if you’re only looking to find some keywords.

For a more in-depth review of Semrush, check out my full review here.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers a wide range of SEO and keyword research features. It has one of the largest databases of keywords and can help you find long tail keywords that are related to your business or website. 

Ahrefs also has an excellent keyword generator that is completely free to use!

If you’d like to know more about Ahrefs, check out my Ahrefs review right here.

4. Answer the Public 

This free keyword generator will offer you hundreds of long-tail keywords and questions of a specific keyword. It doesn’t offer search volumes and other indicators, but as a free tool it’s great if you’re looking for inspiration.

5. Keywordtool.io 

Keywordtool.io is an excellent free keyword generator. It’s fairy simple, but what makes it great is that you can search keywords for specific search engines like Google, Bing, Amazon, and even hashtags for Instagram and Twitter.

Overall, the best tool for finding long-tail keywords will depend on your specific needs and budget. 

Some of the paid tools, like Ahrefs and SEMrush, offer more advanced features and a larger database of keywords, but they can be more expensive. On the other hand, free tools like Google Keyword Planner and Answer the Public can be a good option for those on a tight.

Up Your Keyword Game Today

Now that you have an idea of the power of long-tail keywords, it’s time to start implementing them. While they are definitely effective, you also have to focus on creating and publishing quality content on your website. This will help you provide real value to your customers that will make will keep them coming to your website.

Developing your strategies in accordance with the latest changes in SEO also helps. Being voice search-ready is a great way to rank higher using long-tail keywords. Regardless of what your goals are, long-tail keywords are the most effective way to rank higher in Google and to improve your SEO strategy.

What do you think is the most important reason for using long-tail keywords to boost your SEO strategy? Let us know in the comments section below.

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