Long tail keywords: Definition and Effective Use
Only 22% of people understand the concept of long tail keywords!
Long tail keywords are unpopular expressions that users search for only a few times a month. We call them long tail because they are located in the elongated part of the keyword search volume graph.
Individually, long-tail queries don’t generate much traffic, but collectively, they can make a difference.
Let’s talk about long-tail keywords.
If you read 100 articles, you’ll find 100 different explanations of what they are.
Some define long-tail keywords as phrases of more than five words.
Others claim they are less competitive.
Some say they convert better, and others that they’re more specific than core terms.
In fact, in a recent LinkedIn survey, only 22% of respondents understood the concept of long-tail keywords.
The problem with these definitions is that they arbitrarily draw lines in the sand to separate long-tail keywords from medium-volume terms.
If a keyword falls to the right of this line, it’s a long-tail keyword.
If it falls to the left, it’s not.
And most people mistakenly use word count as a decision criterion.
This makes it difficult to develop a clear SEO strategy that generates significant organic search traffic. Worse still, it can lead beginners down the wrong path, damaging their SEO efforts for years to come.
But don’t worry.
In this article, I’ll clarify what long tail keywords really are, and explain how to use them in your SEO strategy.
Why they’re called long-tail keywords
Unfortunately, most of the keyword charts you’ll find online are wrong.
However, when we plot keyword search volume data on a graph, we actually see an inverse square curve, as in the example below.
This data contains 7,808 keywords related to content strategy exported from Semrush.
Example of a long-tail keyword graph
As you can see, two keywords have high volume (fat head), several hundred terms have moderate volume (coarse middle), and over 7,000 search queries have very few monthly searches (long tail).
In fact, 6,252 of these terms have no monthly volume at all in Semrush.
This represents 80.15% of all queries!
(Although, if you use Google Search Console, you’ll see that there are more than zero monthly searches for many of these queries).
It’s easy to understand why we call these queries “long tail”.
With that in mind, here’s a proper definition of the concept.
What are long-tail keywords?
Long-tail keywords are unpopular expressions that users only search for a few times a month.
That’s all there is to it.
The long tail has nothing to do with difficulty, specificity, conversions or query length.
These qualifiers may correlate, but they don’t define the concept.
Ultimately, it boils down to the number of users typing the same query into their search bar each month.
When we plot real data, it’s much easier to see where each section of the graph begins and ends.
Long tail searches are generally similar variations of more popular keywords – and there are a lot of them!
This means you generally can’t create separate content for these keywords, or you risk cannibalizing your rankings.
So if long tail keywords are unpopular queries with insignificant search volume that are synonymous with higher volume terms, then should you ignore them?
In short: no.
However, you need to rethink how you use them.
Don’t treat long-tail keywords as separate pieces of content, unless they have a unique search intent.
Instead, think of them as part of a larger network of keyword ideas.
In other words, consider the keyword hierarchy.
“Don’t treat long-tail keywords as separate pieces of content unless they have a unique search intent.”
Understanding the keyword hierarchy
Google’s search algorithm stopped matching keywords a long time ago. Now, it analyzes topics and entities among many other factors. So an effective way to rank on the first page of Google is to build your content marketing strategy around groups of topics.
Topic groups are groups of related keywords organized into a hierarchy of blog posts, content groups and categories.
Theme groups are essential to digital marketing because they help you reach your target audience at every stage of the funnel.
They also support your SEO strategy by amplifying your website’s thematic authority and increasing your right to rank.
Here’s how all the parts fit together from top to bottom.
- The categories are very broad and high-level.
- Subject groups are groups of subjects within a category.
- Main terms are blog posts that deal with a specific sub-theme within a group.
- Long tail keywords are related keywords that support a main term.
- The graph below illustrates how long-tail searches generally fit into theme groups.
Advantages of long-tail keywords for SEO
Even if searchers rarely use specific long-tail keywords, they can still play a role in your SEO strategy.
Individually, low-volume keyword variations don’t generate much traffic.
Collectively, however, they can make all the difference.
Let’s discover some of their advantages.
They lead to a more complete content
If you create a list of long-tail keywords before writing your content, you can use these search terms to deepen your text.
For example, you may discover several additional angles to include that initially seemed out of scope but are actually part of the larger topic.
You may also find that a particular group of variations is collectively larger than the other groups, indicating that it may be more important.
Long-tail keywords provide Google with additional context
Some search terms are incredibly broad, especially those with a definitional search intent.
Take a short-range keyword like “content strategy”, for example.
If someone makes that query, he may want a simple definition.
Or perhaps he wants a more in-depth look at the concept.
Or maybe he wants to learn how to develop a content strategy.
He may even need a template.
The fact is, if you want to rank for such a competitive term, you need to create very comprehensive content.
What’s more, adding more specific keywords to your text gives search engines more context than repeating the same general term throughout the page.
- Content plan vs. content strategy
- How to plan your content strategy
- The importance of content strategy
- Developing your content strategy
- Do I need a content strategy?
Strategically adding these terms to your page will help you rank higher for long-tail variants as well as for the more general main term.
They answer more varied search queries
One of the advantages of long-tail keywords is that they match the way consumers search on other media.
Most people use Google when they want answers.
However, there are many different ways to search, including voice search, image search, text search and Google multiple search.
It’s important to know how your audience searches for information when creating your content.
If they’re using voice search more often, they’re probably using more long-tail keywords.
For example, I recently asked Siri “who was the computer programmer in Jurassic Park who stole the dinosaur DNA?”.
But if I’d typed that query into a search bar, I’d probably have written “Jurassic Park programmer”.
Long-tail searches are less competitive
Keywords with high search volume are incredibly difficult to rank for.
On the other hand, marketers often ignore low-competition, low-volume keywords.
As a result, they are generally easier to rank for.
So, if you add long-tail keywords to your content, you can often get traffic even if you don’t rank for the main term.
This traffic can lead to natural backlinks, which can help you rank higher for your target search terms.
How to find long-tail keywords
Most articles that explain how to do long-tail keyword research actually show you how to find voluminous average terms with several hundred monthly searches.
Obviously, these are not long-tail keywords.
So I won’t go into methods that draw keyword suggestions from Google Keyword Planner, Quora, social media, Answer the Public, People Also Ask, Google autocomplete and related footer searches in the SERP.
These sources, especially PPC-based tools like Google Adwords, return popular keywords.
Instead, I prefer to use more traditional SEO tools that include keywords with a lower search volume.
To be clear, the terms in the middle are incredibly valuable.
In some ways, they can be more important than the top keywords, as they’re easier to rank for, more specific and generally have better conversion rates.
But if you simply want to find long-tail queries, I’ll guide you through two methods below.
Competitive analysis method
This is the best way to discover long-tail keywords before writing your own content.
However, I’d like to stress that you shouldn’t limit yourself to the long tail.
Look for all the queries your page should be ranking for, especially those in the middle, or you’ll miss out on valuable search traffic.
Here’s a simple strategy to reveal all the keywords for which your page should be ranked.
- Search for your keyword on Google
Paste the top-ranked URL into a keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. - Filter the top three ranking positions to reveal the most relevant related keywords.
- Export keywords to a spreadsheet
- Repeat the process for URLs ranked second and third.
- Combine lists of keywords and deduplicate them.
The above process ensures that you only get the most relevant terms capable of appearing on the first page of Google. If you don’t see enough keywords in the top three, adjust the filter to show terms that rank in the top 10.
Google Search Console (GSC) method
Use this method to find long-tail keywords to add to your website’s existing content.
In addition to optimizing for a few extra key phrases, you may discover other topics to include in your content.
- Go to the Search Results tab in Google Search Console
- Set the period to the last 30 days
- Add a URL filter for a specific page
- Export all keywords to a spreadsheet
- Filter ranking positions to display values below 20
- Filter printouts to display a value below 10
To be clear, the above set of rules will give you a list of long-tail keywords.
However, I’m ignoring the last step because I want to see all search terms rank on the first two pages, not just low-volume queries.
We want to maximize traffic, so it doesn’t make sense to ignore terms in the low difficulty, high volume zone.
Additional resources
How to use long-tail keywords
In most cases, these are simply variations of more popular keywords.
This means you can’t create separate pieces of content to target each of them.
What’s more, there’s usually a better, more popular version that’s easier to use in your text.
More importantly, it’s impossible to optimize a single piece of content for thousands of long-tail keyword variants, but it doesn’t have to be.
Google understands alternative formulations very well.
I prefer to optimize pages for expressions in the middle of the keyword graph.
These expressions are more specific and less competitive than the main keyword, but they’re still easy to optimize for.
In fact, these are the terms that most SEOs mistakenly call long-tail keywords.
To begin with, group your long-tail keywords into similar variants to see which expressions are collectively more popular.
Then identify the highest-volume expressions in each group.
Finally, use these terms in your page text, internal links and backlinks to help search engines better understand your pages.
In the case of backlinks, you’ll provide richer details about your page while reducing over-optimized anchor text.
Warning about keyword cannibalism
One of the biggest mistakes people make when using long-tail keywords is to create separate pages for similar keyword variations that all have the same intent.
That’s how Google worked a few decades ago.
Today, this approach forces you to fight for ranking.
To avoid cannibalizing your rankings and wasting time creating redundant content, learn to group your keywords.
It’s not very efficient to manually group keywords, but I do it anyway.
There are many SEO tools that automate the process, but few do it properly.
Ultimately, it doesn’t take much time to manually research and group keywords yourself.
If you’re planning to invest 5 to 10 hours in writing a page, why not spend 10 minutes grouping long-tail keywords?
Conclusion:
If two keywords return very similar URLs on the first page of Google, combine them into a single piece of content.
If they have a different search intent, create separate pages.
Summary
As you can see, long-tail keywords are not the massive, traffic-generating unicorns that many SEOs claim.
You can’t create hundreds of blog posts or pages for them without hurting your organic search performance.
However, they do have their place in your SEO strategy.
Long-tail keywords can help improve Google’s understanding of your content and generate additional traffic through micro-optimization.
As always, put your user first.
Don’t over-optimize your content with awkwardly worded keywords, and don’t repeat too many similar variations in your content, which can damage the user experience.
Instead, use keywords to improve search intent, amplify relevance and bring you closer to your target audience.
