If you know how to make optimal use of them, long tail keywords can be one of the secret weapons in your company’s SEO arsenal. Depending on your industry, figuring out the perfect long tail keyword or long tail keywords that will help you reach your ideal customer could be transformative for your business.
We’ve talked about long tail keywords before and how you need to pay more attention to them as online searches continue to evolve. For instance, with the increased use of voice search on mobile devices, as opposed to typed searches on desktops, long tail searches are likely to give potential customers a quicker shortcut to companies that demonstrate that they can meet customers’ needs for specific products and services.
What are Long Tail Keywords?
First of all, before defining long tail keywords, maybe we should talk about keywords in general. A head keyword (or simply keyword) is a term, used in online searches, that is highly relevant to what your business does. If your business provides search engine optimization services, then “SEO” is a keyword that describes your business. If you sell pecans, then “pecans” is a keyword that applies to your business.
Long tail keywords are usually longer versions of these keywords. Regardless of their length, they are more targeted and more specific than regular keywords.
(The reason that long tail keywords are called “long tail” is because they would occupy the long tail of a graph showing search results. There are fewer overall searches for long tail keywords than their more-general cousins, keywords. But this means that it is easier to rank for them because there is less competition. And that’s just one of the reasons why they can be very valuable to your business.)
Because long tail keywords are more detailed and more targeted than regular keywords, they can also reveal more about the needs and intentions of the customer who uses them to conduct any given search.
As a result, long tail keywords can help businesses and customers connect with each other more quickly. If you’re a business, and you want to reach a customer base with a particular set of pain points, then utilizing long tail keywords in your content will be one of your best strategies for doing this.
Your Customers’ Pain Points
Remember the term “pain points”? You’ve surely heard that phrase. It’s a major element of Marketing 101. The customer has a specific problem. If your business can solve that specific problem, then you’re more likely to get hired by that particular customer.
Of course, you have to get found by that customer in the first place. (And, naturally, you have to demonstrably excel at solving the customer’s problem, but let’s assume that you do, again, for the purpose of illustrating the point.)
To show how marketing and content creation that is both precise and targeted can help you better identify pain points and thereby find your ideal customer, consider the following list of terms, all of which could be Google searches:
- cars
- sportscars
- vintage Corvette
- vintage Corvette repair
- vintage Corvette repair near me
- vintage Corvette repair near me transmission
This list obviously starts out with a very general term and then proceeds to a highly specific one. A person who searches for “cars” could conceivably be looking for a place nearby that performs vintage auto repair work. But that searcher could just as likely be trying to learn about the cast of the Pixar movie with that name.
Even someone searching for the less-general term, “vintage Corvette,” could be a person who loves classic cars but does not own one and is not currently in a position to purchase one. It’s not that easy to tell just from these very broad search terms.
On the other hand, a person who searches for the last term in this list, “vintage Corvette repair near me transmission,” is using the search query to tell you exactly what they need. You can probably safely assume that this searcher is a person who owns a vintage Corvette, has a problem with its transmission, and is serious about getting it fixed somewhere close by. That’s a well-defined pain point. And that exact pain point comes out loud and clear in this long tail search.
What Can Your Business Do to Reach That Customer?
Now, let’s say that you own and run a business that repairs vintage sportscars. Maybe you specialize in American-made sportscars, and Corvettes most of all. Perhaps fixing transmissions is where you particularly excel. We probably don’t have to tell you that you really want to find a way to connect with the person who conducted the last search on the bulleted list in the previous section.
How will you reach this customer? Remember that this person is using a search engine, (most likely Google), and that search engine is scouring the web looking for relevant matches that fit the searcher’s query. And Google, like any business, wants to provide high-quality service that keeps users happy.
Your business should have a strong web presence. As a component of that strong web presence, you should have a website with a solid amount of high-quality content. And in that well-written content, you should discuss that your business specializes in “vintage Corvette transmission repair” or, if you’re based in North Canton, you could say that you’re “North Canton’s leader in vintage Corvette transmission repair.” Basically, the more that you can say about exactly what you do and match it to what your ideal customer is going to search for, the more likely it is that you’re going to connect with that customer. And if you can connect, then that means more business for you!
A Quick Note about Voice Search
Keep in mind that long tail keywords are going to become an even more vital component of SEO as voice assistants on mobile phones and other devices become the primary methods that people use to find the information they need. In the future, it will become more likely that people will search for the goods and services that they want using complete sentences than ever before.
Yesterday’s typed “SEO near me” becomes tomorrow’s “Hey, Google, show me companies that do SEO near me.” Again, more and more online searches will be conducted using long tail keywords as voice assistance devices get more deeply integrated into daily life. According to Forbes, by 2020, half of all searches online will be voice searches.
Trust us here at TCM: Your business will not want to be one of those that gets left behind in this rapidly-changing online landscape.
Think Like a Searcher; Write Like a Searcher
One pitfall that companies can fall into involving long tail keywords is making the assumption that customers will describe what they do using the exact same language that they use. Sometimes insider jargon is exactly that.
Your customer may have a specific need that you can meet. You may be the very best and most appropriate business to do so. But if the language that you use online is not the language that your potential customer is using, then you may not actually cross paths online. And that’s bad for your business.
To illustrate this, let’s say that you operate a business that repairs vacuum cleaners. You may be the very best at this service for miles and miles around. You could put every other business that repairs vacuum cleaners in the whole United States to shame with your vacuum cleaner-related skills and knowledge.
But because you live, breathe, and dream vacuum cleaners, you may sometimes forget that these devices are not always top-of-mind for those who are uninitiated in the finer elements of the art of vacuum cleaner repair.
Continuing this hypothetical, be careful that you aren’t inclined, when composing content for your vacuum cleaner repair business, to say that you provide “integrated sanitation device engineering solutions.”
We’ve got news for you: No layperson is going to search for that term! Someone who needs a vacuum cleaner repaired is likely going to search for “vacuum cleaner repair.”
Okay, okay, that’s an extreme example. We know that not all vacuum cleaner technicians are going to describe their businesses that way, (though some might!).
The point is that experts in the field of SEO and content creation will be able to get inside the head of a given company’s ideal customer in a way that the technicians who work for that company often cannot. And the masters of SEO will excel at devising the long tail keywords that an ideal customer is most likely to use.
Did we mention that we here at Triple Canopy Media are masters when it comes to SEO and content creation?
In Conclusion: Triple Canopy Media Will Connect You with Your Ideal Customer
Search engine optimization and content creation—that’s what we do best here at TCM! We’ll give your company’s website a full SEO audit, pinpoint its shortcomings, identify opportunities, and devise effective, game-changing solutions. Our approach is comprehensive. We’ll tighten up your website’s security, optimize your images, create stellar content, elevate your social media presence, and more!
Can your business afford to not be at its best online? Let TCM be your long-term long tail keyword authority!