How to target long tail keywords and why you would like do that?

Once you’ve collected all possible keywords you’ve got to choose the best and most perspective keywords that will drive maximum traffic to your resource.

What are long tail keywords in SEO?

The picture illustrates the idea better than thousands of words.

Long tail keywords example (for pasta fans)

Imagine, you are adding a new pasta recipe to your food blog. Which keyword will potentially drive more traffic to your page?

If you are puzzled  check this:

See how you get total search volume 15470 = 10 + 70 + 590 + 14800 by using longtail keyword “pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes and basil”? That’s because it contains all volumes of its parts.

Short tail vs long tail keywords

But total search volume is not the main reason to use long tails.

No matter how many visitors you can get potentially if your snippet is on 10 page of search results. That’s why we should also competition. It’s almost unreal to get first position in search ranking for “pasta sauce recipe”  if your website is not allrecipes.com or food.com.

BUT! You can easily obtain 1 place for “pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes and basil” as it’s much easier to compete on the words with lower query number.
Long tail keyword strategy are your fast lane to organic traffic Share on X

So you’ve created page optimized for “pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes and basil” and got good ranking in search results and now 10 visitors a month are coming to your page. Is that all we want?  Of course, no.

Our next point is to get good ranking on “pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes” keyword. And you have all chances to have it. As you already got people visiting this page by more specific keyword so se will account this page as relevant for more generic keyword too.

So here is the SEO strategy for thinking mind:

1. Collect as many keywords as possible using different services
2. Choose high-volume keywords that you need manually
3. Find longtails for them which you’ll use in your posts

How to identify long tail keywords

The last point left — how do you find long tail keywords. I identify long tail keywords using my own tool. It takes the list of keywords and leave only longtails only. For example, you give it the phrases:

1. pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes
2. pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes and basil
3. some other pasta sauce recipe

It will filter phrases that are part of the other phrases and leave good long tail keywords only:

1. pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes
2. pasta sauce recipe with fresh tomatoes and basil
3. some other pasta sauce recipe

Okay, now go and never waste your SEO budget again as now you know the long tail secret.