Long tail keywords

When it comes to keywords and phrases, long tail ones are the money makers in ecommerce. But there are no easy ways to win at SEO and so these keywords can often be the hardest to understand.

Going after the long tail is about quality not quantity. You are focusing on terms that attract customers who are looking for something more specific. Long tail keywords are the more specific terms, a niche string of words that people are searching for. For example instead of ‘bags’ being the keyword, it could be ‘vintage leather satchel bags for women’ which is obviously much more detailed.

“When it comes to keyword strategy, we need to look at ‘long tail variants’,” says Joel Williamson, a strategy manager at leading search engine optimisation company, SEONext.

“These keywords are a combination of three to six words that a person types into the search engine, relevant to the specific product they’re looking for. If, for example, you are searching for a digital camera, it’s unlikely that you’ll type in ‘camera’ into Google. Instead, you’re likely to be more specific and search for ‘second hand Cannon ESO Rebel T3I’.”

Long tail searched make up about 70% of searches online. They are important because they attract visitors who are at a different point of the buying cycle. When people search for quite broad terms they are generally conducting research but when they enter more detailed phrases it usually means they have made a decision to buy.

How do you go about finding and utilising long tail keywords?

As with most keyword research you can start yours by brainstorming the kind of phrases that you think customers might type in when looking for your products or services.

There is of course an element of guess-work when it comes to rooting out your best long tail keywords but as usual, Google can help by giving you the actual stats around these searches as well as more suggestions.

Google Keyword Tool is part of Google AdWords and is a great source of information around keywords. You can start by looking for further long tail suggestions that you may not have thought about. Search for one of your terms and Google will supply ‘keyword ideas’ below them.

You can work through these, see if they are relevant and add them to your existing list. Next you want to know the stats around them. What is the competition like for those phrases and how often are they searched for. The ideal is to find low competition, high search rate terms but often it is a case of finding low competition and low search rates. It may not seem like a great plan but if you optimise for these terms and someone does search them – you will rank very highly and hopefully see the returns.

Optimising for long tail terms

Once you have your terms you need to make sure that the relevant pages on your site are optimised for them. Product pages should include them as well as supporting content. As well as onsite optimisation, you can make sure any outside links and content are supporting them too.

“A large part of keyword strategy is researching and then creating these variants. It’s an all-angles approach to get the client as much relevant traffic as possible,” says Williamson. “To implement this strategy, we need to build links from various sources. We make sure these links contain information about the variants and all the content is relevant. We do this through guest blogging, article submissions, and social media.”