How to Find Long-Tail Keywords and Rank for Them

 

How to Find Long-Tail Keywords and Rank for Them

 

What are the Long-tail keyword:

 

Long-tail keywords are the keywords that are used in the search queries by the people over the internet. More specifically long-tail keywords generally have more keywords and reside at the long tail region of keywords vs search per month graph, which is shown below.

 

So from the graph, we can observe that some specific keywords attract all the attention of people and people mostly use those keywords only for a maximum of their searches. For example, if a person wants to buy a book online then he or she will be very specific about the keywords to use as the title of the book, author of the book. So, in this case, you have to use these keywords along with few others so that the search engine chooses your site over the others.

 

But there is a myth that generally keywords consisting of more than 2-3 words resides at the long-tail of the above curve. I am here to bust your myth and make you understand about this matter in detail.

 

The effectiveness of long-tail keywords also depends on the topic that is being searched on the web. For example:

 

Case 1: people generally use the two keywords “rental cars” to search for rental cars available in their locality instead of “rental cars at ABC lane for 500 bucks only”. So if you use the later as your keyword to get traffic on your website then I will get little attention and lesser traffic. But, the first keyword will attract more traffic.

 

Case 2: people generally search for “how to change electric fuse” rather than “change fuse”. Here you can see that people will opt for the link which will have the keywords from the first quoted line.

 

So, from above it is clear that traffic on your website doesn’t depend on whether you are using long keywords on not, rather it depends on the topic that you are working on. From here we can categorize the long-tail keywords in two groups.

 

Long-tail of broad topics:

 

In this section comes the search queries which have few high volume search terms and large variation can be observed in the keywords. A good example will be the search query “how to boot pc”. These keywords will have large volume i.e. these keywords are used in a large number of searches and you can also see that people will be searching for the same thing yet use different keywords i.e. there is a large variety of keywords. In this case, to achieve search engine optimization you have to use the most weighted keywords, in this case, it will be “boot” and “pc”. In this way, your website will be ranked in a good position due to the use of weighted keywords as well as other keywords which also tend to bring some extra traffic to your website and grow your business. But, in the case of a broad topic, there are lots of sites which use the same keywords to attract traffic and they all get a nearly equal amount of traffic. So, using weighted keywords in case of broad topics doesn’t cause much change in the rank of your website. So, you can focus on other features of your website to make it more user-friendly and search engine optimized to rank up. Now how to find the perfect keywords for your website for any broad topic you choose to work on. You have to choose the keywords for your website then you go on any online site to see the traffic received by sites according to the keywords they use. Site Explorer is a good option to search the traffic received by the keywords you choose. There you can look at the sites and the keywords they use to get ranked in the top 5. You can also check the most used keywords and finally, you should check for the traffic they receive daily.

 

Topical long-tail keywords:

 

These are the keywords that are about specific topics and only specific keywords are needed to search the web. These keywords belong to the topics that are not a part of any big topic. For example “keyword eating” is not related to any broad topic so less traffic is already expected at the website related to this topic. Now the broad topics and keywords related to those are eliminated, here you need to focus on the long-tail keywords and their selection as in this case the competition with the other websites is going to be high. So, to rank up you need to use long-tail keywords to attract more traffic. In this region as the keywords don’t have much weight so you have to rely on the cumulative effect of each keyword. Now, you can select your topic and individual keywords and use modifiers with those keywords to attract more traffic. For example, your website is selling rubber bands. So, again you can go to site explorer and search for modifiers that can be used with your keywords. Another way to attract traffic towards your website whose topic is not part of a broad topic is to create FAQ links at the end of your well-established website. Sometimes people become curious and may go to the website. Though it is an optional case. So in the case of topical long-tail keywords, it is necessary to use proper and right keywords to attract traffic to your website.

 

Let us sum up all the things that we discussed. For broad topics, you must use more weighted keywords to attract much more traffic and in topical long-tail keywords, the keywords are less weighted and the sites are also less popular and not a part of a broad topic. So, use the above-detailed tips and get ready to start your work and earn some fortune. Good luck for the journey ahead.

 
Author Bio:
 

Deepak Sharma is the Founder and CEO of withStartups.com – A SEO Company in Delhi for startups. As a serial entrepreneur, Deepak has worked across sectors and countries and loves using technology to solve branding and customer acquisition problems. He is a published author and mentor to many startups.