What's the point in longtail keywords

Hi,

I read this over and over again: Use longtail keywords. Can anybody explain why.

Let's say you compete for words making money online.

Sure "make money online" has a great competition, but if you use "make money online from your couch" and nobody googles that what's the point then.

 

The point is to use long tail that do get searched, although it does not have the 100M that people drool over, and maybe 10k-100k, you are providing EXACTLY what those 10k-100K are looking for.
A more targeted audience.

Using a keyword tool you would choose long tails that people do search for, not just random bullshit strung together.

 

Well, the trick is that you put in the work and construct a longtail keyword that will be used. For some start-ups and generally for small companies, they in most cases won't have a chance to rank high in braod terms searches so concentrating on long tail keywords is a way better approach for them.

 

long tail keywords helps google ranking, more traffic , easily searched, and also it is SEO friendly.

thank u

 

Are there any other tools besides LongTail Pro that anyone uses to do keyword research for long tail keywords?

 

Yes, I am using keywordtool io and its much better than long tail pro. They have very good user friendly look and they also shows related questions for your keyword.

 

Rand Fishkin brilliantly explains it in his Whiteboard Friday episode: Long Tail SEO: When & How to Target Low-Volume Keywords:

 

long tail keywords are less competitive but more targeted, you can get very good traffic from them

 

The most challenging part is creating a title that is visitor-friendly and keyword rich at the same time. Not only is the title seen by those who visit the page, but it is also clearly displayed when the page appears in the search results.

 

If "Make Money" keyword gets a traffic of 10M, a long tail keyword like "Make money at home through internet" might get only 10-100k traffic but it will have a high potential of convertibility as there will be less competition and the search terms are more precise

 

Aside from using long tail keywords (make money online) as for low competition this targeting will cope up your main target keyword as well target your users specifically with (make money online from your couch).

 

Google doesn't just search the main keyword to look for relevancy. Look up LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing for a more comprehensive view of how Google crawls and ranks websites.

To put it simply, the crawlers with the latest Hummingbird algorithms are able to discern what the page is about. It doesn't just look at your main keywords to determine relevancy, but also the synonyms that you should be using throughout the content of your posts. If you are making a post about diet pills for instance, you should be using synonyms such as weight loss pills, pills for losing weight, fat burning weight loss pills etc.

 

Ok, a rider on this one: How long can the Long tail keyword get before it loses it's salt. 3, 4, 5 6, 7...words?

 

That would depend if the keyword is being searched and posted about.

There are some 7+ word strings that are highly competitive. Product names are an example of this.

In other words, the length of the string is not important.

 

Better conversions because it's more targeted and easier to rank because there is less competition.

 

Makes sense. Thanks

 

4-6 words I believe