Long Tail Keyword Research

What is Long Tail Search?

Long Tail Keyword Research attempts to find and target more specific keyphrases, with lower search volumes but also lower competition. The long tail of keyword research involves all the outlying search terms on a chart that plots quantity of searches on the x-axis and competition for a given keyphrase on the y-axis. See the illustration below for an example:

94.3% of Searches are Long Tail Searches

What many search marketing enthusiasts don't immediately realize, is that most of the searches on the Internet are not for the most competitive keywords. While it's true that shorter and more general keywords register higher search volumes, it's not always a good idea to optimize search campaigns on these words, as they can be too competitive.

For any given topic, on average the top 100 keywords (such as "search" and "search marketing") account for just 5.7% of all website traffic. That means the remaining long tail keywords (more specific keywords, such as "search marketing los angeles"), account for the rest - a whopping 94.3% of all searches; according to a study by Bill Tancer, manager of global research for Hitwise.

That means while it's great to achieve a high ranking for a general keyphrase (combination of keywords), you can actually attract a lot more traffic in aggregate by targeting the larger number of more specific long tail search words. In other words, there's so many more specific sub-phrases being searched for for any given keyphrase (ie "search marketing los angeles", "search marketing new york", "search marketing online", etc.), that their sum total adds up to a number much larger than the number of searches done for that one keyphrase (ie. "search marketing").

Finding What People Are Searching For

So by now you're probably wondering, great - the idea is to target specific, less competitive keyphrases. But how do you go about finding them? In comes Google's handy Keyword Popularity Tool. Read our article on Google's Keyword Popularity Tool to find out how you can research exactly people are searching for in your industry, or in areas related to your website and web pages.