What Are Long-Tail Keywords in SEO?

Although 70% of businesses still lack an SEO strategy, the field is still highly competitive. Ranking for the right keywords can be an uphill battle, especially for small businesses.

However, what you may not know is that there are different types of keywords that you need to use to maximize your strategy. Well, with the right tools, it’s easier than you may think to boost your keyword strategy.

Let’s talk about long tail keywords and why they’re so important for your SEO content marketing strategy.

What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Short-tail keywords are keywords like “car”, “ice cream”, or “pizza shop”. These are high-traffic, highly competitive keywords that anybody may search for, which is why so many businesses compete to rank for them.

Conversely, long-tail keywords are the opposite. They are highly relevant, low-traffic, and less competitive. In a niche like digital marketing, some long-tail keywords examples would include:

• SEO services near me
• What are long-tail keywords?
• PPC ad services for dentists
• Managed email marketing services in NYC
• How to start a social media marketing campaign

The list goes on. These are typically highly-relevant keywords to your services that users may search for, albeit less frequently than their short-tail counterparts. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t important!

Why Are Long-Tail Keywords Important?

Essentially, long-tail keywords offer an easier time to rank at the top of relevant search terms. If you stick to short-tail keywords, it could be years before you ever see results, if at all, and you may give up on your strategy.

With long-tail keywords, there’s a lot more diversity, more relevance, and far less competition. If everybody in the IT industry is going after a short-tail keyword like “cybersecurity”, then a small business could easily get ahead of them by ranking for “cybersecurity services in Rhode Island” or “managed IT services near me”.

This can help generate short-term traffic that’s highly relevant. Anybody may search for a term like “car”, but you would only expect somebody who is car-shopping to search for “used Toyota Corollas near me”.

Additionally, they can help support your prospects for short-tail keywords by helping you drive more organic traffic. This is an important ranking factor for Google, especially if you have content that engages your audience.

All in all, spreading your eggs into more baskets is always a good idea, so develop a list of seed keywords to use throughout your content. Try learning how to do a keyword search and develop a healthy mix of both long-tail and short-tail keywords for the best to maximize your content strategy.

Build Your Strategy Today

Now that you know the importance of long tail keywords and how to use them in your strategy, why not put these tips to use? SEO takes time to come to fruition, so the sooner you start, the better.

Start driving new traffic today and stay up to date with our blog for our latest digital marketing tips!