SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

Short Tail Keywords No Longer As Important?

Targeting keywords for your website can be rather difficult at times. There are a lot of direct keywords that you’ll want to focus on as a long term goal, but what about keywords that you can capitalize on in the here and now? Long tail keywords, or basically search phrases, often include your keyword or synonyms for it and are searched by individuals looking for something specific. "Toyota" probably wouldn’t be the term you start with when searching for a new car, but what about "Buy Used Toyota Yaris In Massachusetts"? That’s a perfect example of a long tail keyword. If your site fits that keyword phrase and you can capitalize on it, the visitor to your site is infinitely more important than the one who trails in from "Toyota". Your site isn’t about Toyota, is it? But it is about selling cars in a specific place.

It’s become a rather popular topic recently that as searchers become smarter, one word keywords are becoming less cost efficient and/or useful to go after. The example above shows the difference between someone looking to buy and someone looking for information. If you think about how many different things you could be looking for when you search "Eee PC" in Google (reviews, places to buy, software, accessories, and plenty of others), if you’re trying to make a sale and that’s the word that’s bringing in the most traffic, your sales potential is cut substantially. But if they searched "Buy Eee PC" and found you, you’re sitting on at least a 50% chance of them purchasing from you (depending on how high you rank).

The power of the short tail keyword is heavily dependant on the experience of those searching within your niche. More technical and research related fields will bypass the short tail to find exactly what they are looking for, but that’s not the case for all fields. The industries dependency on short tail keywords is decreasing, but that simply means you have to diversify your approach to gaining a top 10 on the SERPs for multiple terms. As this practice catches on, it may become increasingly more difficult to accomplish, but the benefit of getting started on it right now is very strong.

If you’re looking for a good long tail keyword tool, take advantage of the free service provided by Google Adwords that allows you to search for synonyms and the like for your keyword.

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