If you have a website, you would want it to be high on the search engine ranking so that more searches are diverted towards you organically. More searches give you more visits and thereafter, more conversions. If you know even a bit about SEO, you would know that keywords make the backbone of SEO. Putting right keywords in right places is what would make your web page shine.

Talking about keywords, they are of two types – Short tail and long tail.

Short tail keywords are the phrases made from one or two keywords related to the business or subject. For instance, ‘SEO training’ would be a short tail keyword.

Long tail keywords are the phrases generated using a combination of 3 or more keywords. Thus, they are more specific and targeted. For instance, ‘SEO Training in Mumbai” would be a long tail keyword.

Which type of keyword would give you more visitors? 70% of the web searches are made using long tail keywords today.

 

Think from the perspective of your target user or consumer and you will know that most people search internet using long tail keywords. Google analysed searches of 1.4 billion keywords explored by US internet users. There were some interesting insights –

• 3% of long tail keywords appeared in search volumes over 1M
• The percentage of long tail keywords is higher in lower volume searches
• 20% of the searched volume came from long tail keywords with more than 5 words used

You may have noticed that the example I gave involved mention of a location of the business. Are long tail keywords only used for specific company or product searches? You may wonder that you cannot keep advertising your business and location on every page of your website.  So, what to do? Are long keywords even useful for blogs and other pages on your website?

Let us take an example of a business that is into advertising. A random marketer is searching for help on advertising. He wants to make a Facebook ad that is appealing to his target market. He has an option to either make the ad himself or get it done from an ad agency. In either case, this person would not search an advertising agency directly but would search solution for the problem he is facing which is understanding how to create ads that have significant impacts on consumers. So, this person would use a long tail keyword, “creating facebook ads that work”.

I tried the search query myself on Google and I got 33,50,00,000 results with a few ad agencies actually appearing on the first search results page like Mainstreet ROI and Ad Espresso.

Then I went to the Google Keywords planner to get Keyword ideas and this is what I found:

Keywords	Search Volume
Create an ad	100-1K
Ads that work	10-100
Facebook ads	1K-100K
Create facebook ads	100-1K
Facebook ads that work	1-100

 

When you put a long tail keyword like the one searched by the marketer on your page, what you will get is the total volume of all the keywords shown in the table. Some long tail keywords are so logically related and so frequently searched by people that one long tail keyword can give you a real good volume.

How to Find Long Tail Keywords? Here are some of the online tools that can help you find the long tail keywords for your website –

• Enter your business name on Wordstream and it will show you the most relevant keywords with their Google search volumes
• Google trend will show you how the search trend has been for your chosen keyword on Google
• Semrush is a paid keyword research tool that shows you trends for both organic and paid search