In my previous article, I discussed why you should focus on 12 long-tail keywords. In this one, I’m going to give you some additional insight into what those words are and why they’re so important to optimize your website for. There are two types of keywords: ones that are more generic, and those that are more specific. Knowing the difference will help you choose the best keywords and the right kind of traffic to bring to your site.
Let’s get started with the first type. generic long-tail keywords are terms that have been around for a while but that no one has ever really heard of. These are terms like “credit cards” or “online shopping.” These are good search engine optimization terms because they already have a place in the search engines. You just need to tweak the wording a little bit so that it focuses on search engine optimization towards those terms.
The problem with these long-tail keywords is that there’s a lot of competition. A lot of websites are already optimizing for those search terms, so you’re competing with hundreds or even thousands of other websites for that one keyword phrase. This is known as the search engine optimization cold calling phenomenon. You can avoid this if you can get your website to focus on one keyword phrase that hasn’t been explored yet. For example, if you have a website about medical equipment, you could focus on search engine optimization towards medical equipment since that’s a very broad search phrase.
On the flip side, specific long-tail keywords are terms that are popular but that haven’t been explored too much. There’s still some competition involved, but there’s a much lower amount of competition so it’s easier to rank for those. If you can break down a large long-tail keyword phrase into three to five subcategories then you can rank well. That’s why you should focus on these instead of the more popular and broader long-tail keywords.
So how do you find these long-tail keywords? There are many places to look. You could spend weeks scouring blogs and forums. You could also look at Internet searches and see what comes up. However, by far the easiest way to find these long-tail keywords is to use the use of software tools that will focus on those keywords for you.
A good keyword tool will allow you to search different variations of each long-tail keywords and rank them for you based on their traffic. You should be able to see how many searches have been done for each variation over time and where they come from. This allows you to focus on those keyword phrases and concentrate on getting quality traffic to your website. You’ll find that your conversion rates will go up and your profitability will go up as well.
