Long Tail Keywords...What?

  

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In a recent conversation about inbound marketing, I used the phrase long tail keywords in the context of optimization and better targeting of website visitors and was met with a blank stare followed by the question, "What's a long tail keyword?" As with pretty much every business I know of, jargon had been used and there was a breakdown in communication, so I thought it would be appropriate to share what long tail keywords are and how they work...and they do work!

So, what are they? Long tail keywords are keyword phrases that zero in on your target audience because they are far more specific and relevant to what the web surfer is looking for. This is exactly the sort of content development strategy that inbound marketing focuses on. Long tails speak to a prospect who is very clear on what solution they are looking for. Of course, as you can see in the image, they also don't get as much traffic, but on the plus side, they are far easier to rank well with in the search engine rankings. Are they worth investing time on? Let's look at that in detail.

Let's pretend that we're a commercial air conditioning company located in Ottawa, Canada. It would be great if we ranked #1 for the keyword "air conditioning" because it gets a lot of searches each month. The reality is that it is very difficult to rank well for this keyword, in fact you would need significant resources to make it onto the first page of results. But do we really want someone visiting us who wants information on air conditioning? Well yes of course we do but we're not going to be of any help to them if they live in New York city for example. So let's be a little more specific, how about we say "air conditioning in Ottawa". Now we are getting far more specific about who we are targeting, and since this is our geographic service area this makes a lot of sense. But again, now we will probably get a lot of visitors who are residentially oriented and...we don't service that market. Let's go one step further and say "commercial air conditioning in Ottawa". Now we're in the right geographic and client group market. Bingo!

When I did this exercise for real here are the results I got: (note, I put italics around my search to narrow it a bit)

1. air conditioning- more than 73 million results
2. air conditioning in Ottawa- more than 10 thousand results
3. commercial air conditioning in Ottawa- 2 results...yes 2!

Here's a further reason to be more specific. The difficulty rating in the software that we use at Inbound Marketing Experts indicates air conditioning at 95 or extremely difficult to rank for and expensive if you want to run a PPC (pay per clic) ad campaign. Alternatively, commercial air conditioning in Ottawa has a difficulty of 11 which means we could easily create a page on our website, (even a post in our blog!) that will rank on the first page of results so we wouldn't even need to run a PPC ad campaign. (MUCH cheaper by the way!) Is this valuable to us? I don't know about you partner, but I'd much prefer to have even one visitor a day to our website that was looking for commercial air conditioning services in Ottawa than a thousand visitors who are looking for air conditioning information in general. What do you think?

We're at the edge of the future!