Long tail seo

[tanahoy]

Hi, I watched a video about long tail seo and it was mentioned there that finding keywords that have 0-10 search volume or no data at all  may potentially have super high value for your specific business. Since opportunity score will tend to be high because there’s minimal searches or no data at all, the trick is to check the top 10 SERPs and if none of the 10 used your keyword then you may have found yourself a great long tail seo opportunity. Could anyone please clarify why that would be a great long tail seo opportunity? Thank you.             -Michelle

[BritneyMuller]

It should be noted that individuals searching long tail keywords are likely farther down an acquisition funnel and more apt to perform an action.

Example: "shoes" gets millions of searches a month, is very competitive, but broad/vague. "Women's red Nike running shoes size 6" is a specific, low competition, long tail search. This individual knows exactly what they are looking for and are more apt to purchase.

While this isn't always the case, many companies have become successful by leveraging long tail queries. Amazon being the biggest! Chris Anderson's The Long Tail better describes this phenomenon. There are more long tail searches than there are fat head (short tail) searches. So if you can invest some keyword research muscle into understanding where your long tail keyword opportunities are, and then provide the best resources/content to deliver that information to users, you'll site will be better set up for success.

[BlueCorona]

Hi there!

Long tail keywords are becoming increasingly important because the way people perform searches is changing—especially with the undeniable increase of people performing searches on their mobile devices. People come to search engines for a number of reasons, and one of those reasons is to get answers. So unsurprisingly, search queries often take the form of a question.

Even though a given long tail keyword might have a smaller search volume, they make up the majority of search queries. And like I mentioned earlier, these phrases generally have less competition, making you more likely to show up on the first page of search results and more likely to win the click.

20% of searches occur with voice search—and this number is only going to keep rising as mobile devices become more and more prevalent. You know what that mean? It's the time to shine for less competitive queries—which is great for you because longer queries typically have much higher search intent and are more likely to convert! Use long tail keywords to make sure you are answering the questions that voice queries are asking. Almost 105 of search queries start with who, what, where, when, why, and how.

This isn't a fool-proof way to improve your rankings, but could definitely help you in the long run! Let me know if you have any other questions—happy to help!

[tanahoy]

Thank you for the clarification and for taking the time to write a very detailed explanation.

[EGOL]

The Whiteboard Friday might have described a strategy.  My comments above are about the level of effort and methods used in it's execution.  They describe two ways to execute.  One of them will be treated poorly by Google.  The other is much more costly to execute and will be treated better by google.

It is up to the person doing the job to determine if a profit can be made by put proper effort into pages that will sit on the server waiting for the poorly defended, long tail keyword to be queried.

I have found that it is better for me to simply attack the high volume keyword with quality, long-form content.  Many people do not want to do that because they fear competition.  However, I believe that it is a mistake to fear competition and attack keywords with very high search volume.  Why?  Where you have high volume, you also have high query diversity and a lot of money changing hands. Get very high quality content with keyword diversity into that melee and it will usually pull in traffic and money.

You must assess yourself.  Do you have the ability to produce the high quality content that is required to be competitive and the willingness to attack?  It is easy to know what will win but more difficult to produce it.

[tanahoy]

Thank you Egol for responding to my question. The Whiteboard Friday video that I've watched was just last year.

[EGOL]

This method worked superbly 15 years ago, when Google and other search engines would index every page that they encountered and did not assess it for quality.  Then, webmasters could simply upload thousands or millions of pages with unique title and H1 tags, but duplicate body content in which the target keyword was swapped out from page to page.  Google would index them and deliver traffic.

Today, if you try that approach, your pages will not perform well in search because Google will quickly identify them as "cookie cutter" ages.  Google will either move those pages into the supplemental index, not index them, or their Panda algo will identify the site as "low quality" and demote the rankings.

So, the only way to get these pages in and competitive today is to write at least minimal unique content on them, enough that Google will see them as a reasonable attempt to provide information for the visitor.  This is a lot of work and might not be cost effective when attacking very low volume keywords at scale.