What is long tail search terms
They are very specific search terms and generally have 4 or more words with little competition. Eg. Instead of "Sony Vaio" with have 24,100,000 competing pages, you can target "Sony Vaio FE Series" which have 449,000 competing pages.
Why Long Tail?
Many may ask why optimize for long tail search terms and not competitive keyword such as "Sony Vaio". Ok, let me clarify this point and i am not trying to advice you not to optimize for competitive keywords.
The fact that it takes lots of efforts and time in ranking high for such keywords, why not make use of the waiting time and rank for less competitive keywords that your target audiences might also type?
Idea Of Long Tail Search Terms
It works exactly like the business world. Diversifying your search terms and prepare for the worst. Imagine Google or Yahoo! decided to tweak their algorithms and your prized search terms fall off the top pages. With long tail search terms, you may still get the desired traffic and conversions without wasting your time optimizing your prized keywords up the SERPs.
How To Define Your Long Tail Terms?
Let me give you a clear example that we have performed for one of our client. Instead of spending too much time optimizing "Sony Vaio", we did some researches on the monthly search volumes of some predicted search terms that the target audiences may type.
After analyzing, we further zoom into specific model series of Sony Vaio and got a number of long tail search terms that are less competitive with only 449,000 or less. After weeks of optimization, we managed to gain a significant increase in traffic sources from Google and Yahoo!.
With that, we built good Landing Pages that helps to convert at least 70% of the visitors into potential customers. In this way, we make use of the different components of SEO to help our client reach out to their target audiences while optimizing for the competitive keywords.
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