Are long tail keywords worth chasing?

Posted on | November 26, 2007 | Comments Off

The Long Tail, a phrase made popular by Chris Anderson’s Wired article, refers to the many products that are less popular, but still wanted by consumers. Businesses such as Amazon.com made this kind of purchasing popular and have an extremely successful business model based on it. So, when you are optimizing your site a choice you can make is to go after the “head”, or most in demand keywords for your market, or the “Long Tail”, the more specific keywords. The problem is, how do you know which is better to pursue?

While it is impressive to think of the thousands of people that may want to buy the latest blockbuster you should keep in mind that there might be many more thousands of other movies that people want to purchase in smaller amounts. Either way, they both add up to profits. Here are some advantages and disadvantages to pursuing the long tail

One of the main benefits of chasing the Long Tail is that these keywords tend to have a much higher conversion rate. The reasoning is that people who are searching for a specific product are usually ready to buy. The more generic searchers are usually still in a research and compare phase.

Another benefit is that it is much easier to rank higher for long tail keywords. The competition can be fierce for the more general keywords and phrases in your market. However, not everyone offers the products found in the Long Tail or wants to try to rank for them. This often increases your chances at a number one ranking. An additional benefit of this is that your PPC costs will be lower because of less competition.

Long Tail keywords also tend to increase traffic, and highly targeted traffic at that, to your web site. Since you have a lot more pages indexed and ranked by search engines for specific phrases you’ll have more visibility, which leads to more SERPs. However, this is a gradual result and shouldn’t be expected immediately with the implementation of Long Tail keywords. Additionally, more traffic means more awareness of your site, which ultimately grows your customer base and can lead to increased revenues.

However, there are some disadvantages to Long Tail keywords, too. First is the fact that each Long Tail keyword brings in significantly less traffic than the more popular ones. This means you’ll have to spend a lot of time coming up with words that are searched for often enough to make a difference to your business.

Another problem is the potential keyword combinations. Many Long Tail keywords rely on geographical or similar qualifiers, such as Denver, CO SEO. The problem here is determining which combinations will work best for your market.

Finally, you don’t want to pick words that return only one or two searches per year, so you have to monitor your Long Tail keywords to find out which ones deliver search results often enough to be profitable for your company. The effort of monitoring keywords can take up a lot of time if you aren’t well educated on what your market is looking for.

While there are many advantages and disadvantages to using Long Tail keywords, the best strategy is most likely a combination. Don’t rely solely on the Long Tail and don’t try to make due without it (unless you’re already a bigger company) for the best search results for your business.

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