how-to-select-long-tail-keywords

How to Select Long-Tail Keywords and What Are Them

Every SEO specialist knows about long-tail keywords, which is a good solution for SEO. Such queries are important and any site owner will take advantage if uses them correctly.

We encourage you to check what are long tail keywords and how to use them for SEO optimization.

What Is Long Tail in SEO?

This term was first used in October 2004 by Chris Anderson in his article for Wired. He noted that many new economies are characterized by a significant impact of sales of specific, niche products, moreover, the profit from their sale is comparable to the proceeds from sales of bestsellers.

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The total cost of little-known goods is millions of times higher than the cost of hits. When every consumer can find information about any product, the future of any industry is associated with narrow niche markets.

In SEO, this idea is associated with top and low-search queries. More and more SEO specialists pay their attention to the queries that are less in demand, which can bring higher conversion than top-queries. So, the long tail is usually a low search query, which is a very specific three or four-word phrase.

A classic example of a successful long-tail policy is Amazon that has 57% of all book sales in non-bestseller books. The network effect is a large amount of long-tail sales. This phenomenon is best described by a quote from one of the company’s employees: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

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Why Are They Useful?

Google Analytics provides users with the possibility to find long-tail key phrases. But we would like to tell you about a more universal way. Using a regular expression, you can get a list of phrases from a certain number of thematic words. Why is it useful?

  1. To search for popular queries with low competition.
  2. For analytics. We can set up segments that will allow us to analyze site statistics.
  3. To ensure the potential clients that they need to use the complex approach.

To make it clear, the following example of the news portal will better express the main idea: during the month, users entered 21 thousand different queries with a length of 5 to 8 words (23% of the total number of all queries). This gave 16% unique users of the total traffic. Do many SEO-specialists offer phrases of 5-8 words when promoting a website? In the same way, you can analyze any website of your interest.

Low-frequency promotion ensures a high efficiency of marketing campaigns. This is due to the following factors:

  1. Promotion by low-frequency keywords requires less effort compared to promotion by high-frequency competitive requests.
  2. Working with long-tail queries is guaranteed to bring results, although marketers cannot always predict exactly which keywords will generate traffic. When dealing with high-frequency queries, decent specialists cannot guarantee results.
  3. Low-frequency devices provide a higher specificity of the results to the needs of users.

How to Select Useful Long-Tail Keywords?

If you are wondering how to choose the long-tail keywords, the algorithm of actions is simple:

  • If you are not one of the market leaders, first focus on studying the research domains, but not keywords.
  • Define your main competitors. Pay attention to all the sites that are ranked in the search for queries.
  • Study what keywords competitors are using, what advertising campaigns they run, and where they get traffic from. Once you know this data, you will understand how to act.

If you are a newcomer in your niche, don’t be scared if your long-tail keywords are in the trash of the market leaders. Use low-frequency queries, increase your traffic gradually, and walk your own way to the TOP.

There are two long-tail tactics you can use. The first does not involve keyword research. You just create as much quality thematic content as possible. If you dive deeply into the topic, then you can use low-frequency queries in the text. The core of the site is constantly expanding, which provides you with targeted traffic. This tactic is appropriate if you are pursuing a long-term strategy.

The second tactic is to prioritize the use of specific, low-frequency queries with which the audience searches for information about your products. It is suitable for a long-term strategy in which you plan to achieve short-term results. Its implementation involves keyword research. Also check the best keyword research tools from our article.

Criteria for Ranking Sites by Low-Frequency Queries

According to the marketing company ImForza, 93% of Internet users start searching for commercial information from search engines. Therefore, when implementing a long tail strategy, you must take into account the site’s search ranking factors:

  • Content quality;
  • Technical compliance of the site with the requirements of search engines (this includes the usability of the resource and adaptation for mobile traffic);
  • Behavioral factors;
  • Reference environment;
  • The presence of keywords in the title.

Include the keyword in your article title. If it contains a key phrase, it helps users determine if the content meets their specific needs. Secondly, having a key in the headline helps search engines.

When you link to relevant content from your site in articles, you improve the user experience and make the resource more user-friendly. In addition, you improve behavioral factors: users click on internal links, which increases the number of views per session and time on the site.

In Conclusion

Remember, the main ingredient of the long-tail strategy is content. It should be unique, valuable, and semantically relevant. Users do not need keywords – they are looking for useful information. Your goal is to provide them with comprehensive data on the selected topic and you can’t do this without using long-tailed keys.


So, approach your SEO strategy in complex, including queries that are top and less in demand. Remember, that long-term play means the implementation of a long-term strategy. In this regard, long-tail queries are exactly what you need. Good luck!




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