What are long-tail keywords? How to find long tail keywords? And nine reasons to use long-tail keywords.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, laid out the Long Tail in a series of articles published in 2004 and later in his book The Long Tail. guide to search engine optimization Chris Anderson studied spending data from Amazon, Google and Netflix to come up with the long tail theory.

First, the Long tail theory

The so-called long tail theory is that when goods are stored, circulated, and displayed in sufficiently large Spaces and channels, the cost of production falls so dramatically that individuals can produce goods, and when the cost of selling goods falls so dramatically, almost all products that previously seemed to have little demand, if sold, are bought. contact us seo The combined market share of these low-demand and low-volume products is comparable or larger than that of a few mainstream products.

In the field of traditional media, people are exposed to products selected by mainstream media (such as TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers) every day, such as the top ten best-selling songs selected by each radio station every month, and the highest-grossing movies every month. The same is true of the book market. Authoritative newspapers and magazines often publish bestseller lists. No matter how different the taste of mass consumers, they must accept the bombardment of mainstream media in reality, so that consumption tends to be unified. Everyone watches the same movies, books, and listens to the same music.

The Internet and e-commerce have changed our development. No matter how big a physical store is, it can only hold about 10,000 books. But video rental sites such as Amazon and Netflix are not entirely free from the physical learning environment. In Amazon Books, the website system itself is not just a huge database, the website can provide book design can be easily expanded to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions.

Consumers with all kinds of strange hobbies can find their favorite books and records on the Internet. Online bookstores can sell unusual books with little demand, and can only sell one rare book per year to a single consumer without a significant increase in marketing costs. Physical stores can't do that, and they can't put one book a year in the store to take care of people with different hobbies. Physical store shelves are expensive to display.

According to Chris Anderson's research on Amazon, Netflix, and Google, this tiny, alternative product is huge, and its total sales are no less than those of the top products on the hot list. The typical sales figure curve of this kind of website is shown in the figure, which is also the famous long tail chart.

As can be seen from the chart, the most popular part of the product is small in quantity, but the sales volume is very large. The long tail refers to the "long tail" on the right, where the demand and sales of each product are small. The long tail can stretch to almost infinity. Although the long tail segment does not sell many products per unit, thanks to the long tail segment, total sales and profits can be comparable to the previous segment. This effect has allowed Internet companies to build virtual shelves that provide consumers with a large selection of goods and a "one-stop" service at almost zero shelf cost, which may only require the business to set up another web page. Now many consumers will use the Internet to find their favorite things, or something old.

Second, what are long tail keywords?

There are many definitions of long-tail keywords in network technology. In short, in this article, we can define long tail keywords with the following questions:

Long-tail keywords are more specific, longer search phrases (usually three or more words) that clearly convey the searcher's intent. Due to its particularity, the search volume of this type of keyword is lower than that of keywords, but it brings more convertible traffic.

Short-tailed keywords are phrases with a common meaning, such as "men's shoes." They are sometimes called subject words. Long-tail keyword phrases are longer, while more specific search terms can better describe specific things or concepts, such as "cheap Gucci men's shoes."

Long-tailed phrases have nothing to do with the number of words in them. In fact, the "tail" comes from the search demand curve, with long unwanted queries forming a distorted "tail." Businessman Chris Anderson (Chris Anderson) coined the term "long tail" in 2006. In this way, he describes the shift in the distribution of demand from bestsellers to niche products that make up a significant share of total sales. Using the same methodology, long-tail phrases searched by far fewer people could account for 40 percent of total monthly searches. That's what makes them valuable.

Some people have a common misconception that shorter keywords have higher search volume than longer keywords.

Here is an example of how we can prove that China's view is not entirely correct.

You can see that two keywords with four and five words have more searches than "skinny" with two words.

Is this just an example? Not exactly.

In a study of 1.9 billion keywords, we found that 29.13% of the keywords searched more than 10,001 times per month were composed of three or more keywords.

Here are examples of "long" suffix keywords with high monthly searches:

At the same time, of the keywords we only work on ten or fewer times per month, 13.53% of the words contain only one or two aspects of the word.

Here are some examples of "short" keywords that search for the long tail of the demand curve:

Note: You can't (and shouldn't) check if a keyword is popular by looking at its length. Short words can also be "long tail" keywords, and long words can also be "head" keywords.

In other words, be aware of bias and don't use the length of a word to judge the popularity of a keyword.

Three, how to find long tail keywords?

One of the easiest ways to do this is to use a broad vocabulary for a business topic and type it in using Google. You will then see suggestions for keywords in the Google drop-down box for auto-control filling, as shown below:

These are more specific, less popular terms related to the topic.

In the meantime, you can check out the "People Also Search" section:

The "Related Searches" area at the bottom of the search results.

Free tools for finding long tail words:

https://keywordsheeter.com/

https://answerthepublic.com/

Four or nine reasons to use long-tail keywords in SEO

Novice online teachers are often unfamiliar with the concept of long-tail keywords, and they are not fully aware that there is a huge potential through these keywords. Therefore, let us summarize and analyze the main benefits of long-tail keywords for SEO.

1. Long tails bring a lot of traffic.

A long tail keyword may not attract a large number of visitors. But, on the whole, they can work wonders. Imagine a large bubble surrounded by hundreds of small bubbles.

So big bubble is your main short keyword, for example, New York hotel. Now, there are many ways to extend these "big head" words to grow tail keywords:

In cheap new york,

on discount,

Downtown,

for two,

Honeymoon hotel, etc. These alternatives can account for 40% of your total traffic!

The long-tail keyword contains the first keyword.

Another reason it never hurts to bid for long-tail keywords is that, in most cases, they already contain your short-headed keywords. In the example below, the long-tail keyword contains two shorter keywords, which may also indicate a more general search. This method can kill two birds with one stone.

3. Long tail enterprises bring a better targeted traffic.

When the police ask someone to describe a mugger, they want as much detail as possible because it will help them catch the right person. The same goes for search engines: the better a phrase describes what you're looking for, the better your chances of finding the product or service you're looking for. Therefore, the visitors who end up visiting your site after typing long-tail keywords may just be your target audience.

For example, you may find some popular long-tail variants through which people can find things on your website. Therefore, create other pages specifically for these popular and detailed searches, for example

Women's yellow raincoat

spring collection 2020 (Spring Collection 2020)

hiking gear discounts Hiking gear Discounts

4. Long tails increase conversion rates.

Users who search for more specific terms go further in the purchase cycle than those who buy broad terms. In general, long-tail keywords bring visitors 2.5 times as many paying users as short-tail keywords. Therefore, investment long-tail keywords are often defined as return on investment (ROI) and successful "quality over quantity" strategies.

No matter what kind of micro-modification you do, intelligent long-tail keyword analysis can help you choose the right words for this goal. These could be purchase intent keywords (such as "buy trendy socks in Toronto") or enlist bloggers' information queries (such as "Why masks are important"). No matter what type you're looking for, it's easy to see if long-tail keywords fit your conversion strategy.