Long tail keywords are definitely a better strategy to start with on your blog. The difference between a long tail keyword and a short tail one is that the second is probably a “generic” keyword.
Of course there are some advantages on using generic keywords to bring traffic to your blog, but usually, it’s an inefficient battle you won’t win. The reality is that with such a saturated market you need to work smart.
Just think about the following example:
Apple is making its road to a high-end consumer level instead of fighting on the low end. They only produce and promote expensive products with high quality finish, but even some times, they can’t beat the competition on specs and still price the product on a higher level.
Why?
Simple. You’re fighting into a less saturated and more specific Market. It means that you need to sell 1 iPhone to earn the same money others do while selling 10 generic phones.
Well, in turns out that internet traffic works similar. Have you ever done a generic research on Google? Let’s say we want to read information about “digital photography“. Type it on Google’s search bar and something like this will appear.
Have you seen the auto-complete function on Google Search?
And the more you write, the less results you’ll get, but those results are actually more accurate and specific than the original keyword.
Why is this better for your blog?
Long Tail Keywords advantages
There are many advantages of using long tail keywords on your blog, and of course there are disadvantages too.
The main disadvantage is that long tail keywords have less traffic potential than generic keywords. Is that true?
Generally speaking, yes. A generic keyword like “Digital Photography” could bring thousands of readers to your blog. But in such a crowded market, there are thousands of people trying to rank high for those keywords and 99.9% of them won’t achieve it.
To achieve a top position for a generic keyword like “digital photography” you need an authority blog with thousands of valuable backlinks, a high PR and perhaps even more. If you’re starting a blog, you definitely don’t have that… so, what are the advantages of long tail keywords?
- Less Competition: By far, this is the most important factor to get traffic. Instead of fighting again 100,000 bloggers, you could compete against 5,000 instead.
- Accuracy: This is another factor that I’d like you to understand. If there’s a person looking for “Canon Camera UV lenses“, it’s easier to find it by entering that keyword directly on the Search engines, thank looking for “cameras“. This means the traffic you receive from long tail keywords is “high quality” traffic.
- More engagement: Again, because the people are looking exactly for the things you’re offering. They’re prone to subscribe, buy, comment or whatever you want into your blog.
- Discovery: You can discover new micro-niches that no one has taken yet. Even a niche inside a niche is doable with long tail keywords. It doesn’t matter if you have only 100 hundred readers, if all of them want to buy your product or service, right? Instead of having 1,000 readers of which only 10 of them will buy you something.
Market Samurai allows you to do a full keyword research for Long tail keywords
As you can see, the original keyword has a lot of traffic potential with up to 25,269 visits PER DAY only if my blog is ranked number 1 on the search results.
Sounds cool? I mean, who doesn’t want 25,000 visits per day? That’s almost 1 million visitors per month, only with one article!
But wait, now let’s check the competition; we have 86,400,000 competitors for that specific keyword. No way you can reach number one with your new blog. The first pages should be crowded by high authority sites or even global brands (more into this below).
Let’s focus on a long tail keyword like: Canon Photography courses.
That specific keyword has a potential of 18 visitors per day if I rank on the first page of Google. Sounds good?
Not really. 18 visitors per day aren’t that much, however, look at the competition. Only 77 dudes trying to rank for it!
I bet I’m better than 77 persons in the world, for sure.
How hard is the competition?
Next I went to the Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module and did a quick research on “digital photography“. I already knew this was a crowded keyword. But anyway, let’s see how difficult would it be to rank on page number 1 (not even number 1 result):
Looks like a hard way to go 🙁
Looks like Frodo’s quest to Mordor or even more difficult. As you can see, first search results are from high authority sites like DPreview, digital photography school and even Wikipedia.
All of them have been on the web for at least 7 years and the Page Rank is higher than 4 with tons of back-links behind them. Unless Google suddenly decides to drop them all you won’t even appear on the first page.
Now let’s have a look at the SEO Competition analysis for “canon photography courses“.
Now that looks actually doable!
This definitely looks doable. Even though some sites have a domain age of 11-15 years, their page rank isn’t that good. Some of them are PR 0 and my site is already PR1-PR2. Also, the number of back-links are way lower than before, so getting into the first 10 results should be an “easy” task after all.
Who knows, I could even rank on the first 5 spots…
Actually, if you remember, there are only 77 competitors in this niche. This means even if I’m the last result on Google, I will appear on the 7th page of Google. Compare that to being on page number 800 trying to rank for “digital photography” and now I look much better.
18 visitors per day isn’t bad either. If you can get to the first spot, that means you’ll get 500 visitors per month, just by 1 article. One of the hundreds of articles you have on your blog.
See?
Now that you know the importance of Long tail keywords, work faster and more efficient and get faster results. Even if the results aren’t as good as you expected, you’re building a pyramid based on many articles and posts, which at the end sums up a good quantity of visitors to your blog. Instead of trying to focus on a post to bring 1,000 visitors, focus on 10 posts to bring 100 hundred each.
In other words, diversify.
This also backs you up in case Google decides to lower the rank of your post and suddenly you lose all of your traffic.
And remember, long tail keywords also give you more engagement and targeted high quality readers, and for affiliate marketers, that’s the best audience you can have.
Of course, once you start growing your blog, getting higher PR and gaining authority, you can start focusing on long tail keywords with higher competition levels (and traffic) and outperform the others until you reach the big brands.
In case you want to know more about the tool I’m using here to make the keyword research and SEO competition analysis, make sure to visit my Market Samurai Review.
Talk to you later!
