Build Rankings With Long-Tail Keywords

What You Need To Do To Build Short-Tail Page Rankings With Long-Tail Keywords

If your website is new or has low authority, then you are well aware of the difficulty of ranking for high-volume and short-tail keywords. Honestly, even deep-rooted sites can find it challenging to rank for competitive keywords. Some experts have been known to say to avoid short-tail keywords and to opt for low-volume keywords. While the latter isn’t a bad idea, you shouldn’t simply throw out the highly viable phrases that can lead traffic directly to your website. In fact, those low-volume phrases are what helps get the ranking for the high-competitive keywords.

Not Many Searches Are Unique

When talking about search terms, there isn’t a lot that is truly new. According to Google, only about 15% of queries have never ever been previously used. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t “unique”. For example, let’s assume that hypothetically the following two phrases have never been input into a search engine:

• How to eat a lemon without making a face
• How to eat a lemon without cringing

Are these queries unique? Based on the autocomplete on Google, they’re somewhat similar to the following phrases:

• How to eat a lemon without hurting your teeth
• How to eat a lemon without it being sour

So, what does this tell us? It lets us know that despite the fact that the two initial phrases were within that percentage of unique searches that it is the query string that is actually unique. This is what is going to be your focus for optimization.

Optimize for Intents, Topics and Desires

Perform a search for any topic and you will be able to find hundreds, if not thousands, of different keywords. These keywords represent various things that people want to uncover about that particular topic. You can essentially take a peek at a keyword list of 100 or more keywords and easily discover why it is impossible to optimize one page with every single related keyword for a specific subject matter.

For that reason, you have to break keywords into clusters with each of those groups focusing on a particular and similar intent. Quality SEO says that the intent needs a content page to satisfy a user’s needs.

Here are a couple of short-tail keyword phrases:

• ATV battery
• ATV batteries

These keywords are not the most cut-throat keywords in the world, but they are definitely vital to the industry, which makes them competitive. Of course, those keywords can bring in other keywords that have different intents, including:

• Buy ATV battery
• Replacement ATV battery
• ATV batteries for sale
• Discount ATV battery
• Lightweight ATV batteries
• Cheap ATV batteries online

You need to be able to break your phrases into correlated groups of short-tail and long-tail phrases for some quality keyword targeting so that you can create pages for them.

Don’t Overlook the Important of Short-Tail

Some people are going to inform you to overlook short-tail because it is too expensive, too difficult or too competitive, but it is important that you don’t do this. While it is true that these may be valid points, the important thing here is that you don’t ONLY focus on short-tail. In addition, you must also make sure that you bring in long-tail keywords to complement the aforementioned short-tail.

What you want to do now is to optimize for all long-tail keyword phrases. Locate all of the phrases for a topic with comparable meanings, group these together, then create or locate a page that you can optimize.

For example, if you locate keywords that have qualifiers like these: cheap, discount, sale, clearance, surplus, closeouts – what do they have in common? They have very similar meanings, which means that you can optimize them together on the same page (of discounted products).

Of course, don’t forget to provide a link to your primary product page from your discount page. Sometimes, people won’t find what they’re looking for on the discount page and they will end up buying it at regular price.

Anyway, continue using this process over and over again. You may end up with a few, or possibly a dozen pages, that are all optimized with long-tail keywords with similar intent and a link back to a short-tail phrase page.

Patience Is a Virtue

Throughout this entire process, you must remain patience. It is also important that you maintain realistic expectations. You will not automatically get traction with the short-tail keyword phrase that you desire by optimizing several long-tail keyword phrases. You are still going to need to build and get authority to the pages that you create.

However, taking the time to optimize those pages is a good step in the right direction for building authority. And each time you add a page, you are simply adding to that authority that you have already built. Just don’t forget that you must market, promote and offer value in order to see the realization of your hard work and efforts.

The great thing about all of this is that you will see traffic and sales increase as you work to optimize long-tail to realize short-tail. Believe it or not, when compared to short-tail phrases, you may see between 50 and 100 percent more traffic for your less-frequently-searched long-tail phrases. This is why long-tail is so important.

For more information, contact us at WebDetail.