Articles on Longtail Keywords for SEO Strategy

Friday, May 24, 2013

When targeting search engine results you need to understand the most common strategies for website ranking. Longtail keywords are the searches which make up over 70% of Google search terms. These are often longer than 3-4 words and they can be very specific in relation to your website. This is why most visitors who search longtail will stay on your website for a long time, if you can fill their exact need(s).

For this post I just want to share a few alternate resources which are related to longtail keyword research. There is no perfect solution and it merely requires new attempts at different areas for driving positive traffic. Search Engine optimization is a long-term process and you must be ready to continue studying years into the future.

The Quickest Wins in SEO

When I first landed on the Segment.io Academy page I was stunned by the incredible mass of information. This article was posted onto Hacker News a few months back, and I have been visiting their website many times ever since. More specifically I really like their article titled The Quickest Wins in SEO which delves further into long-tail keyword research.

A very important concept to understand is the process of writing web copy dedicated for longtail searches. You want to write page headlines and inner content which will directly relate to the keywords users are typing into Google. Masses of people are searching for good information online every single day. Sometimes there just aren’t any good choices and they will give up – but you never know how many people are going to look for that same information the next day or week or month afterwards.

One concept I really liked is called bunting. This is where you go and publish a new blog article or landing page on your site which is written for a particular phrase/keyword search in mind. This will lead users directly onto your website and assuming enough of this traffic converts nicely, Google will happily grant your domain more credibility in the rankings. If you don’t have time for reading the whole piece then I must recommend at least skimming the first few paragraphs.

The Resurgence of Long-Tail Keywords in SEO

Recently I found this amazing blog post on Search Engine Watch that describes a lot of traits in longtail writing. Webmasters and bloggers who write content online should understand what makes their articles gather more attention from interested users. One of the bigger concepts focuses on user intentions and what the user is specifically looking for.

When you catch somebody searching for “web design” it is difficult to suggest websites that they need. Are they searching for pages about web design trends, or how to make websites, or do they want to hire a designer for their own website? We just do not have enough information to make a guess.

But the long-tail search for “web designer freelancer new england” is a lot more clear. We can definitely assume this person is hoping to find a freelance designer who lives in New England, and they are most likely on the business side willing to pay that designer to make them a website. Now using this assumption it would be possible to craft a page or directory of freelancers which may capture these searchers and bring them onto your website for a conversion(signup, purchase, reader, etc).

Longtail Keyword Research for SEO

This great blog post on Savvy Panda talks more about researching long-tail keywords rather than writing web content. The process of using Google to find related searches is not as complicated as you may think.

There is a top toolbar which can be found on all the search result pages. You can change the “All results” to “Related searches” and find other topics which people have typed into Google. This will give you a much broader spectrum to work with. Additionally the Google auto-suggest feature has made long-tail keyword research 10x faster.

Now you can just start typing a more basic search of 2-3 words and see what Google suggests. Maybe try changing one of the words and see how this will affect the suggestion results.

Obviously the Google Webmasters Tools will have a whole list of related keyword searches for your website. However this means you need to already have setup the Webmasters analytics, and it will take a bit of time for processing. But keep trying out new search trends and you are bound to eventually find a winner in the approach to write for long-tail keywords.

Although I only got into detail for a few posts, there are some other excellent articles related to longtail keyword searches. The best way to educate yourself is to just start practicing and building up a database of related post content. However these other articles may be worth a couple minutes to see what else you can learn about long-tail SEO.