Grab Customers With Long-Tail Keywords

By Derek Gehl of Entrepreneur.com



Keywords are actually whole phrases, and "long-tail" keywords are phrases with four or more words in them.

Here's an example:
Short keyword: ski vacation
Long-tail keyword: honeymoon ski vacation aspen colorado december 2009

You can see that the long-tail keyword is far more specific and focused than the shorter keyword. But is it worth going after something that specific? There can't be that many people searching for it. Exactly.

With long-tail keywords, it's much easier to get your target market's attention because there's less competition. Most of your competitors aren't concentrating on these keywords, so they are, and always will be, your golden eggs.

The numbers tell the story. For "ski vacation" you'll get results in the tens or hundreds of millions. But for a more specific, long-tail keyword you're only competing with a couple of thousand. That means a lot fewer Web sites you'll have to climb past to get to the top spot in the search results.

But long-tail keywords sell for another reason: People tend to use long-tail keywords for searches when they're getting close to making a purchase.

A person's buying cycle can be broken down into three phases: interest, research and purchase. As people get closer to the purchase phase, they tend to use longer, more specific keywords in their searches. This means the traffic you get from your long-tail keywords is far more likely to lead to a purchase than the traffic resulting from your short keywords.

Long-tail keywords will bring highly targeted traffic to your site when you use them in pay-per-click ads or as anchors in external links back to your site from your articles, blog entries and any social networking you do online. But you can't just leave them hanging there. Someone who uses a long-tail keyword is looking for very specific information. If they follow a link they think is relevant, only to discover that it leads to a vaguely, sort-of-related page, they'll leave.