Quickly Increase Your Search Engine Traffic Using Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are still the bedrock of a proper SEO strategy.

They are longer and more specific keyword phrases that users are more likely to type when they are extremely close to making a purchase or when they’re using voice search.

Why should you focus on long tail keywords?

Because they drive tons of high converting leads to your website that tend to convert exceptionally well. It has been estimated that long tail keywords result in approximately 70% of search volume traffic.

A precautionary measure:

Although long tail keywords have their own importance, it doesn’t indicate that you should stuff them rampantly into your blog posts, this can get you penalized.

Here are some simple yet effective ways to boost your search engine traffic using long tail keywords.

1. Know your content marketing goals

Long tail keywords are an important determinant in the ranking algorithms used by search giants such as Google. They are especially important since user intent can only be found by the keywords they’re using.

Irrespective of other ranking factors like engagement, mobile friendliness, site speed or anything else, remember that the usage of keyword phrases can increase the performance of your content marketing efforts by nearly 15.04%.

Your honest answer on your content marketing objectives can assist you in creating user-friendly blog posts that are likely to rank higher in keyword search results.

Note that your content marketing objectives should align with your organizational objectives.

Copyblogger has listed 10 content marketing objectives that are worth pursuing. Some of the important ones include the following:

1. Building rapport and trust with your customers
2. Attracting prospects to your marketing system
3. Exploring the pains of prospects
4. Illustrating the benefits
5. Overcoming any hurdles
6. Building your reputation with search engines

One of the best approaches includes choosing one or two core objectives that you want every piece of your content to achieve.

The top goals of marketers normally include:

1. Brand awareness
2. Customer acquisition
3. Lead generation
4. Customer loyalty/retention

With patience and hard work, your content marketing efforts can achieve any of these goals.

If you want to attract potential customers to your site, you need to find out the keyword phrases they are using to perform searches and utilize them to write evergreen and helpful content. While writing blog posts, always focus on the premise which is inherent in the key phrase.

2. Create a natural headline rich with keywords

For emails, social media ads, blog posts -the headline is absolutely crucial.

Veteran writer, Jeff Goins, says that the most important part of writing a post is the headline.

And it’s for this reason you should focus on it. Never minimize the efforts you put in while creating the headline, or else you’ll fail to gain traction with your content marketing.

Note that social signs are very important in today’s SEO as they help Google in determining a page’s engagement level. In order to get these valuable social signs, such as retweets, comments, likes etc., you need to create robust headlines.

A headline that is rich with keywords will outperform its generic counterpart.

Let’s take a look at the top search results for a long tail search term-“start a fashion blog.”

Note that all the top results have the keyword phrase “start a fashion blog.” Do not be surprised if an elaborate piece of content other than the ones in the list isn’t able to outrank these.

Let’s validate this by searching for another popular long tail keyword. Let’s try-“fat burning workout for beginners.”

Note that the fourth result targets an entirely different keyword phrase, and that’s one of the factors why it’s not showing at the top.  

It’s evident that Google considers long tail keywords as an important ranking factor.

In most of his posts, Brian Dean uses long tail keywords. He meticulously places them at the front of the headline as shown below:

The keyword phrase used here is “White Hat SEO Case Study.”

Now let’s see where he’s ranked in Google for this particular post.

Boom! He’s already at the top:

Another important factor while writing headlines with keyword phrase is to use numbers. A Conductor study revealed that numbers in headlines resonate well with both the sexes.

While looking at headline preferences across both male and female groups, they found that the weaker sex was even more predisposed to headlines with numbers compared to males.

3. Determine your long tail keywords

The first step involves finding out who your competitors are and the keywords they’re ranking for. An easy way to get started is by knowing the keywords they are targeting, and the traction they are gaining for those specific keywords. There are many valuable tools that can do this task for you.  A powerful tool among them is Rankwatch, which provides you with a detailed view of all the aspects of digital marketing used by your competitors.

The information that you gather from your competitors along with your main keywords will help you in generating relevant keyword phrases you’re targeting.

Let’s say your seed keyword is “Trade Show Displays”.

With the help of this keyword, you can determine keyword phrases, which you should select and target. And any long tail keywords that are directly or indirectly pertinent to your seed keywords should be included in the list. You can use the same tools mentioned above to accomplish this.

The main idea behind this is to find many long tail keywords that have low to medium search volumes as they will help you in increasing your search engine traffic and rank easily.

Here are some suggestions on finding your keyword phrases:

1. They should have at least 3 or more words
2. Low to medium competition
3. Less than 100 monthly searches on Google Keyword Planner
4. Less than 150 organic searches
5. They should be targeted by your competitors too

Try incorporating these keywords in the content of your landing page while continuing to optimize your website for additional long tail keywords.

Conclusion

SEO is not a shortcut to rapid rankings.

The real benefits of SEO usually show in about 6 months or more, which requires patience.

You can also use other platforms to drive organic traffic to your website. Paid networks like Google ads, Twitter ads, Facebook ads, and other networks like Social Noor can expedite the process of increasing your search engine traffic.

Try sticking with most of them and you’ll surely reap the benefits since traffic from long tail search is more targeted than other techniques.

What are the search volume results you achieved when you started incorporating long tail keywords into your blog posts? Do let us know in the comments section below.