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How To Use A Long Tail Keyword Targeting Strategy

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Wouldn’t it be nice if your website could be found by your customers by magic? While technology is getting ever more intelligent, where your website and search engines are concerned, you still need to make every effort to connect the two.

A huge part of SEO (search engine optimisation) is to do with keywords, seen as these essentially act as breadcrumbs leading a trail towards your content. But, not all keywords are created equal. In particular, some keywords have a more broad appeal and others are more niche.

When it comes to long tail keywords, this involves adding more detail to hone in on a particular search phrase. Here’s our guide on how you can use long tail keywords within your digital marketing strategy to boost those all-important conversions.

What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are more specific than the primary keyphrase. If you’re au fait with SEO, you might know that primary keywords typically attract higher search numbers. However, instead of focusing on search volumes alone, it’s essential to also factor in search intent.

Otherwise yes your content will be visible online, but it could be irrelevant to what the user is actually looking for. In which case, they’ll exit your page pushing up your bounce rate. Most importantly, you won’t score that all-important conversion either.

The idea behind using long tail keywords is it gives you a chance to get specific.

For example, let’s say we wanted to highlight our services here at Imaginaire. Primarily, we’re a web design agency based in Nottingham, but we also offer a range of digital marketing services such as branding, SEO, PPC, Google Shopping, lead generation etc.

Here is how long tail keywords would make us more visible online:

Primary keyword – web design

Long tail keywords – web design Nottingham, web designers in Nottingham, web design agency, SEO agency Nottingham, digital marketing agency, logo design in Nottingham.

Using Long Tail Keywords

With our primary keyword of ‘web design’, our content could be seen by a wide audience. However, this could be anyone from those looking for a web designer to redo their website, right through to those looking to study web design as a career. Hence, not all web traffic is necessarily beneficial.

When it comes to using paid advertising in particular, focusing on the searches that are more likely to bring conversions is what we’d aim for. Otherwise, the net is cast too far. The same approach can be used for any of our clients, and indeed anyone else looking to get specific about the type of traffic they are attracting to their page.

Long tail keywords also offer value in other ways, namely because it allows you to add more detail. In our examples, we added the city of Nottingham where we are based. Doing so would mean we’re not only targeting searches for web design but people who are interested or based in Nottingham, which could also bring in relevant leads.

When we go back to the basics of SEO, it’s all about the who, what, why, where and when. That’s because you want to make your content, products and services as visible as possible to the people who are most likely to want to buy them. Long tail keywords are just one such method that allows you to do that.

Implementing A Long Tail Keyword Targeting Strategy

The first step is to find your long tail keywords. To do this, you can either go it alone using paid SEO software or hire a digital marketing agency to do all the legwork for you. It’s important to filter out any long tail keywords which aren’t going to generate a relevant result for the user since a high bounce rate can affect your SEO ranking, which kind of defeats the aim here.

The long tail keywords should centre around primary keywords related to your business, its location (if applicable), as well as all of your products and services. From there, all the data including the long tail keyword and information about the search volume needs to be transferred to a spreadsheet. Keep in mind that long tail keyword searches will have a lower search volume than primary keyphrases because you’ve narrowed your search intent.

Now you have your long tail keywords in a document, it’s a case of implementing these within your website copy, its metadata, blog articles, social media marketing and paid advertising. As with any SEO effort you undertake, you must remember that although long tail keywords are designed to be picked up by robots crawling your site, your audience is very much human so the content should read as such.

From there, you should regularly go into your website analytics and monitor the performance of your keywords. Digital marketing agencies such as ourselves will also do this on your behalf because they want your business to succeed. But either way, be sure not to implement keywords without following up on them, as further tweaks may be needed to maximise the effectiveness of your strategy.

SEO Services Nottingham

Is your SEO in need of some fine-tuning? SEO including identifying long tail keywords is just one of the many services we provide to our clients in Nottingham and beyond.

Simply book your free consultation and we’ll get to work on devising a strategy tailored to your business. Or, drop us an email or call us on 0115 971 8908 to find out more.

You can even get a free website review from our specialists. Just head over to our free website review page and we’ll take a look!

SEO

I write about all things marketing and love to focus on data. You'll see topics from SEO and PPC to web design and CRO.

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