I think because of the rise in the level of content marketing, people are hearing the term “Long tail keywords” more often and are not sure what the term means. Hence, a few times recently, I’ve been asked to explain the meaning of the phrase.

Many keyword searches tend to revolve around two and three word search terms. “web design Norwich” for example. Longer key phrases of four words and more, fall into the term “Long tail” as the name suggests, there are more words in the key phrase. These terms quite often take the form of a question. Which is that with content marketing, answering clients questions can help immensely in the quest to drive traffic to your website.

So that hopefully, partly at least, answers what might have been your next question which is, “Why are long tail key phrases so important?” Apart from just saying though that they can help drive traffic to a site. it’s important to understand that long tail key words are essentially more valuable as there is a lot less competition on those phrases. Mainly because it’s actually very difficult to work out what they may be in the first place.

So how is anybody supposed to work out what long tail key phrases to optimise for then, you ask. You don’t I reply. Well, not exactly at least. You might not know the exact wording of a question that you may be asked, as many questions can be asked in different ways. This is where relevance comes in to play. The point is that you answer questions in as relevant and precise way as possible. For reasons that I won’t go too deeply into right now, Google at least, understands the context of a web page. It basically knows what you mean. I hope I’m not sounding too cryptic. I don’t mean to, so if you want to understand more, I’d ask you to Google “Semantic search” and that might help you understand better about why adding relevant content and thinking of the “Long tail”.

This post may leave you asking more questions. If so, please contact me as I’d be happy to explain more about how “Chasing the long tail” can help your business to grow.

Please do not hesitate to contact me by phoning 01603 383477 or filling in my contact form.