The Long & Short of Search Engine Optimization

The keywords that you use are more important than you think! While short and sweet is sometimes the best answer, a bit more detail can take you a long way. Read more about long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are pretty much what they sound like; they’re longer, more specific keywords which pertain more strongly to your business than other more general – and perhaps more frequently used – keywords. Essentially, the usefulness of long tail keywords lies in its specificity, which greatly increases the chances of the traffic going to your website actually becoming customers. I like to picture a dinosaur here (because, let’s face it, we could all use a little more dinosaur visualization in our lives). The more generic keywords (the dinosaur’s head) have lots of results. As the keywords get more specific, the number of results is going to slowly dwindle down to very few (right to the tip of the tail). The simple truth is that sites like Amazon.com are always going to snap up the majority of super general searches. If you’re trying to get traffic to a small, local, or super-specific website, long tail keywords are essential. When you’re part of a specific niche market, even if someone manages to find your website with a general search, it’s much less likely that they’re searching for exactly what your website offers. In these types of situations, optimizing only for general search terms wastes both you and your potential customers’ time. long tail keywords are all about being found for what your website really is and does. If your website is optimized for these specific keywords, you’re basically guaranteed a website visit and an increased chance of customer conversion. Let’s look at an example. Say you’re a potential customer trying to figure out where to eat in an unfamiliar city. You search for “burger restaurant” and receive a few million search results, the first few pages of which will be filled with mega-chains like Red Robin, McDonalds, ect. People will often start with more generalized searches and refine them if they don’t find satisfactory results. This is where those additional details become critical, if you’re looking for a specific product or service, you won’t find applicable websites unless this criteria is reflected in the website’s keywords. Now, unless you were searching for a massive worldwide burger chain, most search-engine-savvy people will automatically refine their search by adding specific details about what they’re looking for until it looks something like “local burger restaurant in Denver Colorado”. This long tail keyword search will show nothing but locally owned burger joints in one specific area, filtering out the big chains entirely. This is crucial, especially if your website shows up on the first page of results, because you’ve got about a 1 in 10 chance that the searching person will come to your restaurant. As a last note, it’s important to remember that, as useful as long tail keywords can be, they’re only as good as the content they describe. You can bring in all the potential customers you want with specific keywords, but unless your website actually has the information the customer requires, nothing is going to be able to increase your customer conversion. Great content is, in the long run, just as important to the success of a website as any SEO.