What Are Long-Tail Keywords? And Why You Need To Use Them?

Hello, my friend and a very warm welcome back. This post is going to explain to you what a Long-Tail Keyword is and why you should use them in your blogging. This is especially important at the beginning of your blogs life and can be continued throughout.

Search Engine Optimization is something I’m certain you already know a lot about, don’t you? Have you considered making it more effective by utilizing Long-Tail Keywords?

No matter how much content your site contains you can pretty much guarantee that it will rank in Google if you use an effective keyword strategy and this post is going to help you to do just that!

Why is this a big factor for your blog? It’s all about traffic. You could be wondering why your posts are not ranking and no traffic is coming through? If you use short tail niched keywords they are much harder to rank for and in some cases can take 1 year to get even close to page 1!

This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you click a link and make a purchase I will receive a commission. The price you pay will not be affected.

What Is The Difference Between Keywords?

In order for you to understand the process, you need to know the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords.

Keywords are search terms and search phrases that websites compete for in the Google search. “short-tail” keywords are classed as high-level searches. For instance, my niche here at mistakes bloggers make is “making money online” – so you would think that this would be an excellent set of keywords for me, right?

Actually no that would be wrong!

Let us dissect the reason for this by looking at the result in the image below from the Jaxxy keyword research tool:

As You can see there are an estimated 56378 searches on the keywords “make money online” (which is a good amount). Still, the SEO difficulty is estimated at 77. That isn’t too high, but you also need to calculate, that making money online is a very competitive niche – with high ticket marketers competing for the same terms. People and companies like Neil Patel, Forbes, Hubspot, etc are all vying for those words as well.

That is very stiff competition for a new or not that established website because you don’t have the 6 figure resources that the big boys pour into their businesses every month.

Making money online covers different niche topics and that makes it less targeted. This means we need to rank for more targeted keywords like How To Make Money Online With A Blog or How To Make Money Online Using Affiliate Marketing Techniques.

These keywords lead us nicely into what long-tail keywords are:

What Are LongTail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are precise key phrases that focus on one particular subject. They are usually keyphrases with at least three and generally more than four words in the sequence.

Neil Patel has a great image depicting just how popular LongTail Keywords are:

The LongTail Keywords account for 70% of search traffic. If you use 4 or more words that make up for more than 95% of Google searches and this means there is more traffic to go around!

Using more specific words also means more buyer intent and that brings you closer to a sale. 

Let us compare 2 searches: House For sale compared to 3 Bedroomed House In Texas.

If I was looking to rank for an article based on selling a house I would be more likely to be at the top of the search with The second option rather than the 1st.

The second set of words is also far more likely that the user is in a buying position and that is even more reason to use them often!

A LongTail Keyword Strategy

The biggest bonus of using long-tail keywords is this: 

As you can rank for them much easier, no one can stop you from optimizing your content for more than one keyword.

For an excellent long-tail keyword strategy to work, your goal is not to rank for just a single keyword. Your goal is actually to rank for as many searches in the long-tail as you possibly can.

How do you achieve that? 

It’s much easier than you may think – you start off with research. The idea is to find as many long-tail keywords for your subject as you can. Not just one, but 20, or, depending on your piece up to 40. Or even more.

The reason this makes sense is these are often combinations of high-level keywords or just high-level keywords that have some single words added into the mix. 

When you use this many long-tail keywords for your strategy, you are effectively optimizing not just for those keywords but for the complete long-tail of your subject. This is because those keywords will be very close to most of the remaining long-tail searches. 

For example, while I am optimizing this specific post for “What are long-tail keywords?” I am not optimizing for the related searches of for example“What is a long-tail keyword.

Let’s look at some other examples:

• What are long-tail keywords?
• What Is a long-tail keyword?
• Long-tail keyword research
• Long-tail keyword research tools
• Long-tail keyword strategies
• Why use long-tail keywords?

Before writing this post I carried out some research for writing this article about long-tail keywords, using these same tactics and strategies.

How Can We Find The keywords? 

Use Keyword Research Tools

We need a tool to find our keywords whether they are in long or short form!

Below are some examples of tools that can be used for keyword research:

Ubersuggest from Neil Patel. This is a tool that can be used for free to find Long-Tail Keywords. Once you type in the search what you are looking for the tool will show you other related search terms that can be written into your post.

Let’s give that a go:

When carrying out the research for this specific post I came across these related keywords and they aided me to give the article a high-quality title as well as the related terms to use throughout the post for the best possible ranking positions.

Using this list from the image above enables you to search for even more related terms by entering your newly found long-tail keywords as a new starting search.

It may not be possible to utilize all of the suggestions but at least it gives you a more favourable beginning.

Jaxxy Allows you 30 free searches a month.

As you can see from the image above Jaxxy gives you some different examples of long-tail keywords that are related as well as some that are the same as in Ubersuggest. By using more than 1 tool you can get even more results!

Google Search For Long-Tail Keywords

Using google you can find either Autocomplete and Related searches. ( these options are free)

The autocomplete function is what happens when you start typing into Google search: Google suggests what you want to search for automatically. And the suggestions are very often great long-tail keywords that you can use for your content.

This is how that looks:

Another option for you is to use Google’s Related Search box that also appears on the result page below the search results at the bottom of the page:

This gives you a few more options to use.

How To Optimize Content For LongTail Keywords?

Now we have the finding of the keywords covered we need to look at how we are going to optimize our content. This can be achieved by using SEO plugins.

Many bloggers whether new or old make huge mistakes when optimizing for long-tail keywords: They optimize for only one keyword! You are missing out big time on traffic doing that because long-tail keywords are far simpler to rank for so take full advantage.

Many SEO plugins force you to work in certain ways but that doesn’t mean you have to do it!

Let us see how we can change things up:

Carrying out the keyword research gave you a subject for the post. As you’ve written the post after your keyword research, you wrote a post that is already optimized for your long-tail keyword.

Now that your first draft is complete, you can enter the second phase of the optimization strategy by using SEO tools like the Yoast plugin.

This can be accomplished by typing the keywords into the snippet box and waiting for the green smile to appear.

This is also possible using the all in one SEO plugin. The only difference is your SEO score will go up as opposed to the traffic light system that Yoast uses.

Throughout this post, you will find many examples of long-tail keywords that were suggested by the various search tools and this gives the post the best chance of being optimized and that is what we are aiming for!

Why Use LongTail Keywords?

Have you ever wondered how a visitor finds your blog post?

They more than likely have never heard of your website so they don’t type that into the search. No. What they do search for is LongTail keywords that answer their questions or specific queries.

The other reason for using Long Tail Keywords is to help Google to know not just what words searchers want to know about but why they want to know about them.

Google is all about user experience as well as user intent.

My Final Thoughts

There is one more tip I can share with you and that is about your old blog posts. Maybe you didn’t know about SEO and long-tail keywords when you first started writing.

Now that you do it is an ideal opportunity to go back through your posts and update and optimize them for more traffic and higher ranking in the SERPs.

All you need to do is carry out some more research and add in the new keywords that have been discovered. They need to be written in a natural way so the post still makes sense. You can do this by adding new paragraphs to the existing article.

Updating all of your posts regularly is highly recommended!

By following these tips you are giving your content the highest possible chance of getting to page 1 position 1 of the search engines.

No niche has too much competition when articles are written in this way!

Thanks for supporting me to the end of this post I appreciate your time.

Have a question for me then please leave it in the comments below and I will get back to you as soon as humanly possible.

Did you get value from this post? If you did then please share it to help others using the social media buttons provided. Thank you.

What strategy have you been using?

Lisa. Founder and CEO of mistakesbloggersmake.com